Are there any Third Way legislators? The More-Progressive-Than-Thou Left think Third Way is the dominant Democratic Party organization.
3.
hells littlest angel
Where can I get an Ocasio-Cortez 2028 lawn sign?
4.
Gelfling 545
I just always figured Third Way to be embarrassed Republicans.
5.
matt
I don’t think Republicans going around saying she’s ‘dumb’ is going to be effective.
6.
Dennis
I’m not Third Way, but can we game this out? One-time blanket debt forgiveness can’t be done without a paired free college plan or each new year will create an entirely new crop of graduates with the same burden. And doing debt forgiveness more than once without a free college plan will be a tremendous incentive for colleges to jack up prices even faster without repercussions.
7.
Betty Cracker
EJ Dionne had a column about Third Way last week (I think); I almost wrote a post about it. Apparently there was a meeting of the dinosaurs on the shores of a DC tar pit, and they finally admitted they were wrong to consider markets as a cure-all in the 1990s and even owned that a rising tide had failed to lift all boats! Also, they’re trying to claim President Obama as one of their own. As we used to say back when Third Way was relevant politically (as an inadequate detox to Reaganism/Thatcherism): AS IF!
8.
Chief Oshkosh
AOC was sure right about calling the concentration camps what they are: concentration camps. I define “right” here as both accurate AND politically astute. She’s gotten the conversation going again on what I find to be the worst of the worst of the depravities of the Republicans and the one depravity that even some (not a lot, but some) Trump supporters find troubling. Possibly just as importantly, it’s the one issue that I’ve seen corporate media types give Trump and his ilk fairly repeated pushback on.
We need to keep this on the front burner until all of the kids are rescued and the entire jackbooted apparatus and its individuals are put out of business. Several BJers say they’ve been calling their delegates daily. I’ve been using their online forms because I don’t think I could hold my temper if I talked to a human being who works for my Senators (I lost it last time I called several months ago when the first stories were coming out of Texas). I know, weak on my part. I will have to work up to it by calling someone’s blue Congressperson to at least get into the groove.
The GOP and the corporate, centrist Dems are really, really afraid of her. And with good reason: 1) She’s spearheading true social democracy, and 2) everything they sling at her either misses or she deflects back at them with style, humor, and punch.
One of their problems (they have many) is that they keep engaging her on her social media, and she’s better at it than they are. Same for the twisted loons who go after the Parkland kids: They end up with eggy electrons all over their sorry mugs.
11.
Bill K
@Dennis: Oo, look. Someone who actually thought this through. Dennis makes a good point. What is the root cause of the student debt burden? Why is college so expensive? Why does demand not decrease as the price goes up? Waving a wand to cancel existing debt sounds appealing, but does nothing to solve the systemic issues. A starting suggestion – Allow student loans to be considered in bankruptcy again.
12.
Tim C.
@Gelfling 545: I would say it was the old, Northeastern Republicans who had at least some sense that comprimises of some kind must be made to the masses and had zero interest in regulating sex lives of others. They used to run the Republicans; now they are basically the Horace Slughorns of the Political World. Sure, it would be better if they were still running house Slytherin, but they aren’t. And now it’s time for them to choose.
Yeah, it’s weird how much attention they get. They seem to do nothing except make statements to the media. That politico report last week about how “corporate Dems” were warming to Elizabeth Warren was all Third Way quotes.
Moderate, blue dogs, and corporate Dems are a thing, but Third Way is all hot air, from what I can tell.
Are there any Third Way legislators? The More-Progressive-Than-Thou Left think Third Way is the dominant Democratic Party organization
Yes. Every now and then I take a look at The Young Turks YouTube channel and stuff from other pro Bernie people. They salivate over this stuff.
I had to leave a comment. I said that it was stupid for Bernie, who has never been a Democrat, to keep insulting the party, or to see it as his responsibility to purify it.
They seem to be intent on pushing the argument that the present party and all the Democratic presidential candidates have failed the legacy of FDR, and only Wilmer can set it right.
This is a grand delusion. I just want someone who will crush Trump.
15.
ThresherK
This freshman Congresscritter has an otherworldly command of pertinent ideas. Well done.
No one was paying attention to the issue. I know we won’t get debt forgiveness with Warren. But they have to, have to, respond to what people are worried about.
The funniest part about Third Way and the rest of the centrist groups is they had it all. They had the power to do something. They did nothing until it collapsed. The one and only reason they are speaking out is they are threatened. Why did it take a threat? Why are they so completely out of touch with regular people that they did not notice that college costs were skyrocketing and states were putting more and more of the costs on students? It’s not that they’re “centrist”. It’s that they’re useless. They do bad work.
These are the same people that saw 16% unemployment in 2010 and said “let’s start a campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare!” And were quite successful! The entire elite discussion became about the debt and cutting entitlements.
I mean, CHRIST. They don’t live in this country, in any real way.
A program to provide benefits to (1) can make sense. A program to provide benefits to (1), (2), and (3) can make sense. A program to provide benefits only to (1) and (2) is incoherent.
If your response to people in (3) saying they are being unfair excluded is to say: they should just be happy for the (2)s. Then that argument would also apply to only providing benefits to future college-goers and saying the (2)s should just be happy for the (1)s.
Allow student loans to be considered in bankruptcy again.
I actually suggested that to Warren. By email. Which od course she read :)
We already have an expert debt court. It satisfies the people who will be angry if some debt is cancelled and some is not, too. Colleges and universities will scream because they don’t want that kind of risk/reward analysis, but tough shit. They didn’t do anything about it either. Time to fix it. Make it dischargeble in bankruptcy, like all other unsecured debt other than taxes and child support. Get rid of the special status. Done.
It’s not that they’re “centrist”. It’s that they’re useless. They do bad work.
Quoted for truth.
22.
Jude
I rarely disagree with almost anyone around here and am most certainly NOT a centrist, but forgiving college debt DOES seem to help the very affluent. One thing I haven’t heard anyone mention is capping for families that make over, say, $200k/yr. Why should families that make that much or more get debt forgiveness? Aren’t they getting enough perks?
We need to reign in college costs period or have more avenues to free college for families who make less than 100k.
AOC doesn’t seem to be thinking this one through, honestly. And Mr. Bernie ‘The Republicans will see the poll numbers and fall in line’ Sanders never thinks anything through.
They seem to be intent on pushing the argument that the present party and all the Democratic presidential candidates have failed the legacy of FDR, and only Wilmer can set it right.
And from the other side of their mouth, they’ll tell you that FDR was a racist neoliberal sellout and that his legacy must be replaced with true progressivism, which can only come from one candidate.
24.
A Ghost To Most
So Feisty! Her talk about “concentration camps” has made several talking heads asplode.
I hope her security is solid; she’s drawing a lot of attention from the crazies.
25.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: That’s the real Sanders vs. Warren schism: He thinks the Democratic Party as it exists today must be destroyed and remade in his image to be legitimate, and she believes the current party apparatus can be used to push the kind of structural change needed.
26.
ant
I’m 45 years old, and have never had any college debt.
How about we start with ending the DAILY FUCKING PHONE CALLS being dialed to me about my student debt.
Also, NO I DON”T WANT TO EXTEND THE WARRANTY ON MY CAR! STOP FUCKING CALLING ME EVERY FUCKING DAY.
I can’t wait till AOC shifts her gaze to BernieBros.
Uh… yeahhhhhhhhhhh, any day now, I’m sure.
29.
ThresherK
@Jude: “Forgive college debt with a cap limit” sounds good.
30.
Barbara
The answer to college debt isn’t just forgiveness, although that might be part of it. The answer is a change to the bankruptcy laws and other structural changes to how college is priced and paid for. For instance, limiting increases in federal loan guarantees (or however it ends up being regulated) so that colleges can’t simply assure themselves that their tuition can be paid with by loans.
The problem with Third Way is that it makes this statement “oh, it might actually increase inequality!” as a way of shutting down any discussion on the issue, rather than as a way of moving the discussion forward by proposing something they might actually favor in the way of alleviating educational indebtedness. That’s another way of saying, “we actually kind of like the status quo,” which is where the Wall Street sympathy comes into play.
31.
Baud
BTW, since I feel like being a spoilsport, while AOC is good at Twitter burns, this tweet seems unremarkable to me.
He has some other vague thing about how it has to be a “movement” or nothing will happen. It feels like it might be a distinct difference but it’s too airy for me.
He has to be worried. He shouldn’t be tanking in the Moveon poll. Can’t go down, has to go up. He’s not even holding.
For all their complaining about the “rigged” primary in ’16 turns out Bernie benefited hugely from the lack of competition.
Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) Tweeted:
Breaking on @MSNBC: NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reports 100 migrant children moved out of the Clint, Texas Border Patrol facility, a facility described as “appalling,” have been moved back into that facility. It is unclear where the other children moved out of that facility have gone. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1143547058768556032?s=17
@Frankensteinbeck: @Baud:
Agree that they’re manufactured from whole cloth because it’s convenient to have their “fresh ideas for ending partisan gridlock” aired at regular intervals. AOC is probably justified citing Wall Street as the prime funding source and I’ll only add that not only do they have the moolah, they have connections aplenty to ensure bookers get them on the air. And that last bit lends credibility because the networks can claim “We’re representing all valid viewpoints. Look at us!”
In my lifetime we have had one successful third-party candidate: George Wallace. Does anybody wish a do-over of that?
@Kay: Of course he benefited from lack of competition. He is like my friend who won all kinds of science awards in his small high school district who found himself no better than average when he matriculated at a competitive state university. You can actually go pretty far when you are the only one even trying.
“The Centrists” can’t do this. They can’t be in charge for 30 years, not address any of these issues, and then scream bloody murder when anyone proposes anything. They don’t like it? Fine. Put something else up. And it probably shouldn’t be some convoluted, phased in tax credit bullshit that no one understands and gets so watered down it’s meaningless. It also can’t be limited to poor people because those programs are vulnerable and always under attack. They need a bigger group of people with a stake in it. Democrats used to know this. You put the middle class in front of the poor so when the attacks come the middle class is there defending. That’s the one and only reason some of the programs still exist. They could not take them from middle class people.
If they are losing power they have to look to themselves! They’re responsible for that! Who else would be?
40.
trollhattan
@ant:
The phone has ceased being a useful voice communication device. I seriously don’t know why we keep a land line and I almost never answer my mobile, because perhaps one in ten calls is legit. And now the spam is leaking through to my text. My name is Enrique and I evidently have a one-hundred dollar Amazon gift card as soon as I call this phone number.
Thank you, free market.
41.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: It’s weird to me that we look at higher education only from the side of the consumer and not from the perspective of the cost drivers. It wasn’t that long ago that tuition at public and private universities was affordable for a middle-income family. The Reagan revolution brought with it drastic cuts in federal and state funding for higher education, and the loss of that funding was passed on to the consumer in the form of skyrocketing tuition. I’d like to see that level of state and federal funding restored. It’s actually more important to me than forgiving student debt, though loan modification and renegotiation is obviously needed in some cases.
42.
trollhattan
@Just One More Canuck:
“Did you say duck? Why do I need my ducks cleaned, they clean themselves!”
43.
Wapiti
@Jude: There is a school of thought (or maybe it’s just Atrios) that believes that there’s no need to limit government assistance to how much a family makes IF we have a real progressive income tax structure. If a family earning $200k pays $15k more in annual taxes than a family earning $100k, then the government will recoup the tuition money over time.
44.
patrick II
AOC is the most talented politician I have seen since Obama — and the race isn’t over.
45.
Kathleen
@kindness: What makes you think that’s going to happen?
46.
patrick II
I have read that will hound AOC into unpopularity in the same way Hillary was. I am not so sure. Hillary was nice, and AOC isn’t. And I mean that in the best way possible.
One thing I haven’t heard anyone mention is capping for families that make over, say, $200k/yr. Why should families that make that much or more get debt forgiveness? Aren’t they getting enough perks?
Central to Sanders platform is the insistence that his “progressive” proposals be universal. In some ways he is an old fashioned commie.
The phone has ceased being a useful voice communication device. I seriously don’t know why we keep a land line and I almost never answer my mobile, because perhaps one in ten calls is legit. And now the spam is leaking through to my text. My name is Enrique and I evidently have a one-hundred dollar Amazon gift card as soon as I call this phone number.
Thank you, free market.
Happy though I am to blame corporate awfulness for anything they do wrong, in fact pretty much all of those calls are coming from criminals. The phone companies hate them, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology until recently it was much, much easier to prevent the calls from being traced (which means you can’t prosecute) than to block them. There is a fix that’s now in the process of being implemented, and the FCC has issued an order which I’d describe as telling phone companies they won’t get in trouble for blocking calls that nobody wants (and, yes, that was a real issue – phone companies are supposed to connect calls, after all), so there’s some hope things will get better.
49.
Another Scott
@Wapiti: As I understand that hobbyhorse of Atrios, his argument is that every time you put a condition on a benefit, you increase paperwork, bureaucracy, friction in the system. So, instead of capping student loan forgiveness for people making over $200K a year, just make it available to everyone and increase the taxes on the well-off to pay for it.
It makes a lot of sense.
But Congress will never give up its power to bestow tax favors, so we’re always going to have at least a hybrid system. And if we have bureaucrats evaluating whether someone qualifies for one type of tax credit/benefit, then it shouldn’t be that much more burdensome for something like this (if it’s structured sensibly).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
50.
ant
the@randy khan:
The numbers are fake. They look like my local area.
@tobie: Providing some level of free nationwide schooling (equivalent to, say, the Cal State level of quality) would do a lot to decrease tuitions elsewhere IMO, since they’d have to justify their prices as a value-add. Obviously this is simplistic, but I see it as sort of a “Medicaid+ for all” deal.
@ant: I stopped answering unknown phone numbers, especially those from my own exchange, a few years ago. It’s hard to say what you could do to crack down on phone number spoofing since it’s super easy, technologically speaking. IANA telecom engineer though.
53.
Kathleen
@Baud: Thank you. I myself am biting my keyboard. I didn’t think Third Way was still a thing. They were a thing and screwed people over. It seems to me now the Dems are working to try to help people. Republicans want to kill us all. Why is Third Way a thing again?
54.
Brachiator
OT. Iran really got under Trump’s skin, they needled the shit out of him, and so he responded like a petulant child
Donald Trump threatened to attack Iran in retaliation for any strikes by Tehran “on anything American”.
The threat came after Iran said new US sanctions precluded any diplomacy and called the White House actions “mentally retarded.”
“Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality.
“Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration,” Trump said in a Twitter post.
Putin is going to have to calm Trump down again.
55.
hueyplong
Been waiting a while for someone like AOC to start dropping daily quotes for mass consumption from a seat in Congress, and second the breathless anticipation for that magic moment when she turns on a BernieBro.
So , instead of capping student loan forgiveness for people making over $200K a year, just make it available to everyone and increase the taxes on the well-off to pay for it
This kind of thinking is central to Wilmer’s view of domestic policy. It’s redistribution fantasy. Oddly enough, the Republicans love this as well. The recent tax law eliminated a number of caps on credits which previously had been limited to the middle class.
And since the wealthy have more recourse to tax avoidance schemes, this policy quickly becomes regressive and a bigger burden on ordinary people.
60.
Wapiti
@Kathleen: From where I sit, “Third Way” looks a lot like “Libertarian”, Republicans who are a little embarrassed or disadvantaged by some Republican dogma, but they’ll vote Republican every time.
61.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t dispute that. I’m interested in how to keep tuition low while maintaining high quality and for that you need the level of state and federal funding you had in the 1960s.
62.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kathleen: They seem to be attempting some kind of relaunch. They were the source of that “The Establishment Loves Warren” article that’s been giving Bernie and Sirota the white hot fantods for the last week or so
63.
FlipYrWhig
Isn’t there a relevant statistic about how much of the burdensome college debt stems from for-profit programs that target people who don’t know how much cheaper community colleges are? I feel like the indebtedness crisis is compounded by the shady quality of the education people are receiving in exchange for that debt.
64.
FlipYrWhig
@Wapiti: I thought “Third Way” was basically “affluent, fiscally conservative, but has at least one married gay friend, votes D and sometimes self-labels as liberal.”
65.
Tim C.
@kindness: I don’t think that’s likely. AOC is probably well aware of the Bernie Bros being a problem, but she’s going for a very similar wedge of the pie so to speak. I would much rather have her than Bernie as the leader of that wing of the party too, so crapping all over them would be likely a mistake.
66.
Shana
@Bill K: Well, one of the causes of college tuition going up is that the states stopped funding their schools at the rates they did through at least 1980. Private schools were always more expensive than state schools but they weren’t $50,000 or more a year, as many are now, compared to the $8-10,000 I paid at the University of Illinois between 1977-1981. And that included all my living expenses.
I’m sure someone else with more knowledge than I possess has already weighed in on all the other reasons.
@Tim C.: She is more or less of the Bernie Bros, just politically adept, so I don’t see her coming for them any time soon either.
@tobie: I thought it went without saying that setting up a free high-quality national education system like the one I suggested would require large federal and state investment.
“The Centrists” can’t do this. They can’t be in charge for 30 years, not address any of these issues, and then scream bloody murder when anyone proposes anything.
Their whole purpose is to scream bloody murder when anyone proposes anything. Their core argument – not always stated but certainly communicated – was that FDR & LBJ went too far, too fast. On regulation, on the environment, on workers’ rights, on women’s rights, and most especially on African Americans’ rights.
69.
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: AOC was the one great success of the BernieBro/Our Revolution/Cenk Uygur wing of the party. She hasn’t inherited their worst characteristics. But it might take her a while to turn on them if she ever does.
70.
Aleta
@Mike in NC: Are they shuffling him somewhere else in the stacked deck? So they can announce “We listened to your concerns ! Thank you America! Problem fixed !”
The Reagan revolution brought with it drastic cuts in federal and state funding for higher education, and the loss of that funding was passed on to the consumer in the form of skyrocketing tuition.
The cuts were also a direct response to 1) the protests from the students during the Vietnam era and 2) more POC going to college. Conservatives thought if the students had time to protest, they didn’t have enough skin in the game. Cut aid, make them work more. And they’ve always hated the idea of paying for POC anything.
I’m still for debt forgiveness because it’s strangling two generations of people. Need bankruptcy reform too. Debt forgiveness, bankruptcy reform, and state/federal education spending increases.
72.
MomSense
Has anyone actually met a Third Wayer in the wild? I figured it was basically just Michael Bloomberg and an occasional musing at the Morning Joe table.
73.
Shana
@Just One More Canuck: Anybody else get the “Hello. Is Barbara there?” calls? I get them about twice a month and periodically swear a blue streak at them. Doesn’t make a bit of difference of course but I feel better for having doneit.
74.
TomatoQueen
@ant: Look into the call-blocking service called Nomorobo. It works for landlines and is supposed to be available for mobile altho there might be a cost for it. For landlines it’s free, and it works. Comcast had no trouble with adding it in and it makes working at home possible again. The spoofing and phishing and other shenanigans may go on, but with Caller ID monitoring all calls, I can see which ones are valid and which are the clowns threatening to arrest me for owing the IRS. The volume of calls in general has dropped, too.
That said, consider some Luddite behavior. Only certain people get my landline phone number. My cell phone is used only rarely and for limited purposes, and again, nobody gets that number unless needed. I do not own a smart phone, and indeed on the occasions I’ve had to borrow one, I have loathed the damn things, which comes of having what’s called Essential Tremor in my dominant hand, which otherwise sucks. Skype on my home laptop is limited to two people. I do not text anyone or anything for any reason, and will take texts from only one person. Again and again I must emphasize–this is me making the decisions, accepting whatever limits and failures may occur, and unfortunately finding that because I live in Northern Virginia where election activity never ever stops, I’ve had to resort to Nomorobo and found it works. YMMV, but taking back some control of my personal time and also making sure that calls during business hours are work-related or else to do with my small and frail family are worthwhile trades.
75.
Kathleen
@Wapiti: @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Weren’t there also some Lieberman Dem types as well? I was reading this latest invocation as an attack on the old Blue Dog Dems. But I’m also old and have a sinking feeling I’ve totally lost the plot on this thread
76.
Kent
I’ve been thinking about this college cost issue for a long time having had my own student loans as well as one daughter currently in college and two more to come. There are really two ways to make increase subsidizies and reduce the costs of college:
1. Reduce the cost of PUBLIC college education. Some (not all) states have been bleeding higher educatio budgets and pushing more and more costs off onto students. The Federal Government could do a lot to reverse this by increasing subsidies and proving carrot/stick incentives for states to do the same thing. Making public higher education more affordable is really a question of both reducing bloated costs and increasing funding. I don’t think it needs to be free, just much more affordable. And I would oppose any kind of means testing. Just tax the wealthy more to cover improvements to public higher education and they will be paying more anyway. No need for complicated income-based means testing at the other end. We also need to greatly increase investments in higher education in the fast growing suburbs and urban area where most students actually live. Commuter schools and such. Not all students can drop life for 4 years to go off to some flagship university in some small college town in the middle of nowhere.
2. Loan subsidies and forgiveneness. The NYT did an article today. Most student loan debt is actually for high-priced private schools and grad/professional schools. A fairly small percentage is for undergraduate study at public universities. I don’t think there is a compelling public policy objective to creating a massive public subsidy for say the 20,000 students who choose to attend Liberty Baptist University and pour their tuition dollars into the pockets of the Falwell clan. That is EXACTLY what would happen if we turned loans into grants through loan forgiveness. We would in effect be pouring billions of public dollars into the pockets of every kind of evangelical grifter who forms a “university” from Liberty Baptist to Oral Roberts. There are hundreds of them. And this isn’t even getting into the issue of for-profit universities. So I think a loan forgiveness program needs to be well thought out and impose a lot of rigid quality-based measures on the insitutions themselves. I don’t have any answers here. But frankly, subsidizing ultra-expensive private religious schools and ultra expensive law and med schools attended primarily by the wealthy isn’t at the top of my list of priorities.
77.
glory b
@Jude: You are correct. I live in a mostly low income neighborhood, and most of the young people here won’t go t college, or will go to community college. The education they receive in high school isn’t usually good enough to qualify them for most colleges and universities.
So, what this would mean would be a huge economic enefit for the middle to upper classes andlittle or nothing for them.
I read an article a while back abut a European country (Scotland?) that tried free college with no other changes and came to the conclusion that it was a huge windfall for the middle and wealthier classes, paid for in a significant part by the lower classes. If I recall correctly. it was paid for by an across the board tax increase. But, it didn’t make it easier for the more poorly educated to gain admission.
78.
Shana
@Brachiator: I saw earlier that Russia has weighed in and said that the drone was in Iranian airspace.
79.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Opposing means testing of benefits, to the extent that you can, is good. The more people a redistributive program benefits, the more popular it will be. The other side is always going to want to put in some sharp cutoff so they can then divide people and conquer.
That said, a cap on a benefit for rich people is one of the gentler kinds of limit you can have.
About the Erase College Debt Plan…another way of looking at it:
Miranda
*raises hand*…because this whole erase college debt plan is a lowkey reparations plan for middle to upper class white people.
………………………………..
Miranda
Black folks BEEN borrowing to go to college for decades because we always had less resources to go to college debt free. I can’t even think of anyone unless it was a full scholarship plus stipend, who went to college with their parents paying for it completely out of pocket. But the cost of tuition at big time state schools which have less than 5% of minority students, like your Ohio State and Univ of Alabama and Oklahoma and USC – those schools tuition rates have risen astronomically and white students have had to borrow more and more to attend. Its not the Ivy League students that are doing the squawking about loans..its these white folks at the football and basketball juggernauts who now want their “free ride”. They don’t wanna talk K-12 public schools, they don’t wanna hear about community colleges and free junior college tuition because that’s beneath them. They don’t wanna hear about free technical training..NOPE..this is about their wanting to dump their debt so they can continue gentrifying up another neighborhood to push out black folks.
Joe Biden is trying to appeal to younger voters as he is expected to launch his bid for the presidency. However, for years, Biden made it his mission to block student debt forgiveness, leaving many young people facing a lifetime of debt.
Warren is going to slaughter Biden on this, and she won’t need to do any research. She knows this shit inside out and backwards.
83.
trollhattan
China goin’ down against Italy. Unless Japan wins later today it’s US v Europe the rest of the way.
I only wish this wouldn’t encourage their supporters.
86.
TomatoQueen
@Kathleen: Joe Lieberman, before exposure as Mr Splinters in his Backside, was a Democratic Senator from Connecticut. He was, during Clinton, referred to as the Conscience of the Senate. This made people from New Haven laff and laff.
@rikyrah: That is a good point. Plans for free tuition typically include community, junior college, and technical school. AOC emphasizes those schools need to be included in a free tuition plan. Something to keep in mind when looking at different plans for debt reduction and forgiveness.
93.
germy
Third Way isn't a Democratic group. They are an independent "centrist" group of indeterminate political affiliation. Democrats don't claim them. Nor should they.
— Victoria Brownworth #PrideMonth?️? (@VABVOX) June 25, 2019
94.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@glory b: @rikyrah: that’s why I’m skeptical of these plans, but
because this whole erase college debt plan is a lowkey reparations plan for middle to upper class white people.
this demo have (even more) amplified voices among the internet/twitter left. “Everyone I know” went to college, and/or plans to send their kids.
They took 100 children out of one of those hellholes. Then PUT THEM BACK IN.
CBP’s excuse? THEY HAVE NO MORE FUCKING ROOM ANYWHERE ELSE.
They think somebody’s playing with them. They think that they are phucking slick.
And, I still wanna know if their tracking system has gotten better than my local cleaners.
96.
germy
That’s something @AOC seems to understand that many other members of Congress don’t: that an entire conservative media apparatus exists to amplify bad-faith interpretations of things progressives say. The only reasonable, genuine response is to simply restate your position.
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) June 24, 2019
And, I still wanna know if their tracking system has gotten better than my local cleaners.
I will bet that they still have no official tracking system at CBP. Records would mean personnel could be held accountable. its the one thing they learned from the Nazis.
99.
germy
I didn’t know wealthy people took out loans for their kids’ college. I didn’t know wealthy people qualified for loans for their kids’ college.
Talking about fierce women, how many more have to come forward before the media takes their charges against Trump seriously?
It’s not about the media. Trump supporters will never take these charges seriously. Trump has been absolved of all crimes because he is giving the right wing everything they always wanted.
But the cost of tuition at big time state schools which have less than 5% of minority students, like your Ohio State and Univ of Alabama and Oklahoma and USC
This smells wrong. Googling I see OSU is 69% white, Alabama 78%, OSU 69%, USC 40%. Am I misreading something?
102.
germy
Very cool that the new WH Press Secretary already has experience lying on behalf of the administration. When Melania Trump wore her "I really don't care" jacket, Grisham responded by saying nothing was meant by it… but clearly hadn't gotten on the same page with Trump yet. pic.twitter.com/YCqiVi3n8C— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) June 25, 2019
103.
TS (the original)
@Mike in NC: Is there any organisation in trump’s administration that has a head – rather than an acting head?
@Brachiator: my family is quite comfortable and I had undergrad loans. Wealthy people aren’t eligible for like, subsidized Stafford loans, but those aren’t the only kinds of loans.
112.
MattF
@germy: Note that Hugh Hewitt is moving up the RW ladder to head the Nixon Foundation.
Opposing means testing of benefits, to the extent that you can, is good. The more people a redistributive program benefits, the more popular it will be.
Not necessarily true. There are, of course, fewer ultra wealthy people, so you may be talking more about influence, not popularity. And the federal revenue is not an endless cornucopia. Trump’s tax cuts, which expand numerous tax benefits to the wealthy, has exploded the budget deficit.
Also, in order to pay for all these maximum super duper benefits, you must increase the taxes on middle income people as well as the wealthy.
114.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mandalay: There were plenty of folks right here on BJ who were ranting against Ocasio-Cortez when she was a nobody running against Joe Crowley.
Really? I mostly remember people thinking she was an impressive campaigner and very few people knowing who Crowley was– which also seemed to be true in his district and that was the problem.
But we all know how important it is to you to see yourself as both a prophet and a martyr, so… bleat on.
115.
germy
“It’s unfair to call them gas chambers. They’re merely rooms that fill with deadly poison.”
— Box Brown (@boxbrown) June 19, 2019
116.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MattF: Note that Hugh Hewitt is moving up the RW ladder to head the Nixon Foundation.
twitter Nixon is gonna psuedonymously plotz
117.
Kathleen
@Patricia Kayden: Media won’t take this seriously until ther handlers determine Trump is no longer useful. When it ‘s time for Trump to leave office we will hear about ot.
118.
scav
@patrick II: Well, maybe as a campaigner, but there’s more to being a politician. Getting the gears and houses and snakepits et al to grind (in the proper direction no less) is another important skill. (Pelosi fits as stromg here). She may get there, but a part of that skill comes from working the coalface itself. Merely winning elections is snazzy policial vaporware, and even highlighting issues without subsequent action isn’t much more (youtube influencers can manage that). Time will tell about the other dimensions.
119.
Uncle Cosmo
@ant: I have some ideas about how to end the robocalls:
1. The Do Not Call list becomes opt-out, not opt in. No calls from commercial entities unless you specify them (e.g., company you buy stuff from). Big-$$$ penalties for violation.
2. Everyone gets Caller ID.
3. Caller-ID spoofing (i.e., call is not from the number Caller-ID reports) also gets pricey penalties. If the technology to do this isn’t around yet, either invent it or change the phone system to permit it. (One day I got half a dozen calls that said they were from my land-line, which is the number I was answering on!)
4. Recipients of calls can report them to a National Do Not Call hotline.
5. Combine 3 & 4; if enough call recipients report a particular number, it becomes identified as a Commercial Entity.
6. No more cheap calls for telemarketers: Commercial Entities are charged a significant amount ($0.25 would probably do) for every call they make. Anything over the phone corps’ costs (maybe + modest profit) goes to the Feds to fund this operation.
Probably details to be worked out, but the basic idea is to charge & fine these bastards enough so telemarketing is no longer economically viable. That’ll stop it toot-sweet.
(FTR I hear the msg about “your student loan” & laugh my arse off – that was 50 yrs ago & I too never had any student debt.)
Then I don’t understand all the “eliminating college loan debt is a giveaway to wealthy parents” arguments. ?
The wealthy get to maximize benefits they already enjoy. Maybe use the 529 money for graduate school (unless Wilmer’s nutty plan will apply to every kind of higher education) or use the extra cash freed up for a vacation.
@Major Major Major Major:
University of Alabama – 10% Black in a state with a 27% Black population
The Ohio State University – 5.3% Black
USC is a private school.
Asians 16.8%
Black/African-American 5.6%
Hispanic 14.8%
White/Caucasian 30.7%
International 23.9%
Other 8.1%
I would have used UCLA. …..
Among the nearly 25,300 U.S undergraduates there, about 39% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 31% are white, 20% are Latino and 4% are black, according to last fall’s statistics.
@Brachiator: isn’t it that a lot of student loan debt is held by upper middle class types, not the wealthy per se?
@rikyrah: if the author meant ‘black’ they shouldn’t have written ‘minority’, then. I don’t see how else you get 5%.
123.
glory b
@Major Major Major Major: As I recall, she traveled with Bernie after she won her primary, campaigning for other challengers he was endorsing.
I believe they had limited success. It feels like she is kind of withdrawing from that circle.
124.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kay: Alte kakkers like Wilmer are obsessed with “movements” – usually bowel movements. And “bowel movement” may be the truest description available of his candidacy.
125.
MattF
@Uncle Cosmo: I use Nomorobo, and it works pretty well. It’s free on a VoIP landline.
Hardly. There were plenty of folks right here on BJ who were ranting against Ocasio-Cortez when she was a nobody running against Joe Crowley.
Seriously? I don’t recall a single BJ conversation supporting Crowley and bemoaning the fact that he was being challenged from the left in a safe Dem district. Really? I don’t come close to reading every BJ thread but I call BS on this.
Watch her during hearings. Her questions make it obvious she’s doing the hard work and research.
Compare her to the more experienced politicians who use their time to make speeches. (During one hearing, I saw Klobuchar use her time to make what sounded like a campaign commercial, touting her “reaching across the aisle” to “accomplish things” rather than using her time to get useful information out of the person she was questioning.)
130.
germy
@joel hanes: Abrams is inspiring. She is one of the best we have.
131.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: You know that the vast majority of private colleges are not like Liberty University, don’t you?
I don’t have a problem with you not wanting to subsidize expensive private colleges. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I can see the point. Just be aware that you are more likely to be cutting off funds for Oberlins and Reeds than Libertys and Regents.
132.
TenguPhule
Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders said in a message to employees that he would resign on July 5. He did not give a reason for leaving his job.
“Although I will leave it to you to determine whether I was successful, I can unequivocally say that helping support the amazing men and women of CBP has been the most fulfilling and satisfying opportunity of my career,” he said.
Get right the fuck out of here.
133.
eldorado
ant: stop answering your phone. voice calls are a 20th century gizmo.
134.
Gex
@Jude: My thinking is that the taxes to pay for universal college tuition and student loan relief will primarily be coming from those families. So they will be getting something on one hand, but giving much of it back on the other.
The benefit of universal college tuition and student loan relief relates to the set of stakeholders who benefit from the policy. We can already see right now that those at risk of being excluded from the policy are not terribly supportive of it.
ETA: This is not me endorsing it necessarily. It’s just me pointing out the stakeholders consideration.
How would college debt forgiveness is limited to families that make under $200k work?
My kid is going to graduate next May & let’s say she has some college debt. Once she gets out she is on her own & she’ll probably not make $200k. So through a bankruptcy court she can get that debt forgiven if she needed to file BK?
So this forgiveness would apply to everyone but the small percentage of graduates that get out and make $200k?
Seriously? I don’t recall a single BJ conversation supporting Crowley and bemoaning the fact that he was being challenged from the left in a safe Dem district. Really? I don’t come close to reading every BJ thread but I call BS on this.
Its true. Mainly because she had terrible taste in associates. Sanders supporters and an incompetent adviser.
138.
Kent
I will be more likely to support loan forgiveness when it can be explained to me how it would not result in a multi-billion dollar direct Federal subsidy for the evangelical religious right. There are currently about 600 religious colleges in this country. Many of them are Catholic like Notre Dame and Gonzaga. Some are Baptist like Baylor and Wake Forest. Many are mostly religious in name only like SMU. But there are also hundreds that are hard-core right-wing evangelical institutions like Liberty Baptist, Oral Roberts, and Regent U. And dozens more that have lower national profiles but are basically the projects of right-wing Evangelical churches and profit centers for Evangelical grifters like the Falwell family.
If you create a loan forgiveness program or turn existing loans into grants then you are basically creating a firehose of Public dollars straight into all those right wing Evangelical institutions. Billions of public dollars. The grifting would be enormous.
Explain to me how to create a loan forgiveness program that doesn’t amount to a MASSIVE public subsidy for those schools and directly into the pockets of those Evangelical grifters and I’ll be more inclined to get on board.
isn’t it that a lot of student loan debt is held by upper middle class types, not the wealthy per se?
Not sure. A random Google search found this.
U.S. student loan borrowers owed a collective $1.6 trillion in federal and private student loan debt as of March 2019, according to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System…
Sixty-five percent of college seniors in the class of 2017 graduated with student debt, according to the most recent data available from The Institute for College Access & Success. Among them, the average student loan debt was $28,650.
The average U.S. household with student debt owes $47,671, according to NerdWallet’s 2018 household debt study.
Students who pursue professional degree programs can expect to take on much more. Here’s how the average student loan debt compares for the class of 2018.
Average debt for medical school graduates: $196,520.
Average debt for dental school graduates: $285,184.
Average debt for pharmacy school graduates: $166,528.
Explain to me how to create a loan forgiveness program that doesn’t amount to a MASSIVE public subsidy for those schools and directly into the pockets of those Evangelical grifters and I’ll be more inclined to get on board.
Decertify them as educational institutions. Just like Trump U.
143.
Gelfling 545
@Tim C.: “The Horace Slughorns of the political world”. Love it.
@Kent: I do remember some comments. Nothing too dramatic. Most were of a ‘interesting to see what happens in this safe district’ type.
146.
Aleta
U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded facility, citing lack of options
WaPo
(After they announced this a,m, that they had moved more than 300 children out of that facility. Either they lied about the number, or 100 kids were bussed away and then bussed back.)
147.
scav
@germy: I’m not saying she doesn’t have skills or potential. I’m just a bit tired of the seemingly continual round of the latest greatest young savior that will fix all if only elected. Beto, Buttigieg, how many others? Well, that and the seeming reduction of political skill to campaigning prowess. But I’m personally not going to crown anyone best politician until they’ve put some time in the sausage making and produced some actual salumi.
148.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator: she released a very well made video late in the primary that went viral, and I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t front-paged her, and linked to several times.
@TenguPhule: was that during her own primary, or the subsequent and extremely premature, and largely unsuccessful “We are all sosh’lists now!” victory tour she went on with Sanders?
149.
Brachiator
OT. Trump is looking for a new Minister of Cruelty to Children
Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders told employees on Tuesday that he would be stepping down from his post on July 5, according to a spokesman for the agency.
The resignation of Sanders, who became acting commissioner just two months ago, follows reports of children living in squalor at border stations where they often lack child care, bedding or even basic hygiene items.
150.
Kay
Although the nation’s $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan balance is shocking in the aggregate, it’s composed of many different kinds of borrowers and many different academic programs. The Sanders and Warren plans illustrate the difficulty of moving from big-picture numbers and slogans to the nuts and bolts of federal policy.
“And I, a reasonable centrist, offer absolutely nothing in response to either the Sanders or the Warren plan except some stern scolding”
They’re professional critics. If they’re not scolding the public they’re scolding politicians. How long were they planning on letting this go on? Forever. The level of debt would just rise forever. We’re at full employment. If it isn’t going down now it isn’t going to go down. They did nothing.
151.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Sam Brodey @ sambrodey
Sen. Lindsey Graham on E. Jean Carroll’s rape accusation of Trump:
“He’s denied it. That’s all I needed to hear.”
Meanwhile, Brave Brave Sir Willard has declared his brow furrowed.
@Kent: You know that the vast majority of private colleges are not like Liberty University, don’t you?
I don’t have a problem with you not wanting to subsidize expensive private colleges. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I can see the point. Just be aware that you are more likely to be cutting off funds for Oberlins and Reeds than Libertys and Regents.
I’m actually a Reed graduate. Reed has a $600 million endowment and Oberlin’s is approaching $1 billion so those are not perhaps the best examples. And yes, I have thought about this a lot. Rather than direct Federal subsidizies for private schools through a program that essentially converts student loans into grants, I’d be much more supportive of a new program of private-public partnerships that private colleges can tap into. Take Reed College, for example. It is located in suburban Portland. Rather than subsidizing ultra-wealthy students from the Bay Area and New York to study the classics at Reed (yes, I went there, that’s what goes on), we could look at where higher education is coming up short in the Portland area and provide incentives for Reed to create new quasi-public degree programs to serve a wider population than the elite few that attend Reed (mostly from out of state). Create some new Federally subsidized STEM or Bioscience program there or Computer Science that is publically subsidized and open to a wider range of local HS students to attend and take advantage of what Reed has to offer. If Reed doesn’t want to do that then fine, the money can go to Lewis and Clark or University of Portland or one of the other local private schools.
If Liberty Baptist wants to tap into Federal dollars they could do the same thing. Open up a public/private partnership program on their campus that follows all Federal rules on things like discrimination, LGBT rights, etc. Are they likely to do this? Probably not. But there are a LOT of small struggling private colleges around the country who would probably jump at the idea to create public/private partnerships and create new programs on their campus to serve local students who need more options.
Just saying, there are lots of creative ways to subsidize private/public education without it being just an uncontrolled subsidy for the religious right.
A Customs and Border Protection official disputed the (visiting lawyers’) allegations Tuesday, arguing that the child detainees in its custody receive “continuous” access to hygiene products and adequate food while awaiting placement in U.S. shelters designed for children. The official said that the agency was working closely with the Department of Health and Human Services to move the unaccompanied children to appropriate shelters and that it had cut the number held in Border Patrol facilities from 2,600 to less than 1,000 in the past week.
The official told reporters that after moving children out of the Clint facility over the weekend and into Monday, the agency had to return 100 children to the station Tuesday because of a lack of bed space in U.S. shelters and insufficient funding to expand facilities for children.
The conditions at the border facilities and lack of bed space have become part of the Trump administration’s argument for passage of its request for $4.5 billion in emergency appropriations from Congress, a proportion of which is designed to fund the housing of unaccompanied children through private contractors.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters at the White House on Monday that Congress must approve the emergency funding now because the agency has no more capacity to hold children, despite the fact that federal officials said this month they are planning to open three emergency shelters to house approximately 3,000 to 4,000 children, two on military bases and one at a facility in southern Texas.
155.
Betty
@Kay: Well said! So happy to see some real policy changes being proposed.
Bill Cosby would like a word. He’s wondering why there’s a lower standard for the President of the United States.
If Trump were a comedian this would be a career-ender. Since he’s President of the United States it’s not.
It’s turned into this amazing job where there’s absolute blanket immunity. I don’t know- could the founders have intended this? Only if they were insane.
Rejecting a request from Trump, a federal judge in Washington has cleared the way for nearly 200 Democrats in Congress to continue their lawsuit against him alleging that his private business violates the emoluments provision of the Constitution. https://t.co/Fyt6XIfvg8— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 25, 2019
160.
trollhattan
@lee:
IIRC when congress “improved” bankruptcy law by making it harder for individuals to access it, they also removed student debt as a forgivable debt.
Hopefully somebody more lawyerly than I can verify/correct/mock my “facts.”
was that during her own primary, or the subsequent and extremely premature, and largely unsuccessful “We are all sosh’lists now!” victory tour she went on with Sanders?
The aftermath of the primary mostly. But I do remember a few heckles because she was challenging as part of the Bernie crowd.
@lee:
IIRC when congress “improved” bankruptcy law by making it harder for individuals to access it, they also removed student debt as a forgivable debt.
Yep.
There are exceptions, however, namely if certain conditions regarding financial hardship are met.
@rikyrah: Don’t insist on perfect legislation. The democratic coalition has to stick together to have the votes to get anything at any time not just now. This does mean the white middle class democratic voters should also expect to vote yes on some things that benefit POC more than themselves, however their are black and other minority families that WILL benefit from college cost reforms (to lump a bunch of stuff together). The minorities that do manage to go to college tend to have higher debt too.
The college cost debt issue is pretty complicated, has multiple causes and effects vary a lot. As a University Financial Aid Counselor for over 20 years, I’d like to point some things out. States impact costs much more than the Feds do. The local economy impacts it too. Different states right next to each other cost very different amounts due to the accumulation of decades of choices from the college itself and the state governments. Then many students attend and make choices for themselves and have different luck in employment. You end up with people in all different kinds of situations that don’t sound anything like what you (or I) experienced. A real solution will have to be multipronged and some of it will have nothing to do with you. Some of it will or at least your younger relatives though.
I’d like to see state funding go back up to where a state school at any of the types (vocational, jr college or University) get back to something people can afford by working, minimum wage to go back up to cost of living, some kind of debt forgiveness to be worked out, and also properly fund preK through 12 without false school grade punishment and test nonsense do that the poor are actually getting a fair good education and a chance. I don’t know how to get there. All I have is an ear for more of the same doesn’t work bulls* that got us to where we are.
164.
MattF
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ll note that Graham (apparently) didn’t say that he believes what Trump said.
165.
Kay
@juliehdavis
40m40 minutes ago
More
Just now @TheOtherKeppler asked Ivanka Trump, emerging from Senate Republican lunch, whether she has any reaction to the allegation of rape again her father. Silence. “Should women be believed?” No response.
Since Ivanka blows off real questions, like the super-special person that she is, should they continue to cover her self-promoting marketing events? They have some leverage here. They could use it. There’s no public value to printing pictures of her in a hard hat. They should get something in exchange.
166.
Aleta
@Aleta: Lies. + Using children’s lives to blackmail. Horrendous incompetency. + Using the threat of more child deaths as pressure to get money to use for more corruption. And they refuse to accept and distribute diapers and supplies and clean clothes that people are trying to drop off at the building.
No other options? Reunite them with relatives, set their parents free, apologize and compensate. Haul in whoever is running the facility. Make every guard and official who went inside testify under oath. Subpoena any official at ICE and CBP who gave an order or signed a paper to do with this facility. Make them wait for weeks in a crowded moldy building with no windows, showers, clean clothes or contact with the outside.
First, I agree – we deal with hundreds of these at my workplace every month and they not only are not stopping, they are increasing in frequency. I get at least ten a day on my cell. It’s intolerable. Now let me tear your ideas to shreds:
1. The Do Not Call list becomes opt-out, not opt in. No calls from commercial entities unless you specify them (e.g., company you buy stuff from). Big-$$$ penalties for violation.
Congress had this option and fought it to the death. They know where their campaign contributions come from. It’s not you.
2. Everyone gets Caller ID.
A good idea. It’s available everywhere and very few don’t have it anymore, but it should be free and available to all.
3. Caller-ID spoofing (i.e., call is not from the number Caller-ID reports) also gets pricey penalties. If the technology to do this isn’t around yet, either invent it or change the phone system to permit it. (One day I got half a dozen calls that said they were from my land-line, which is the number I was answering on!)
The technology to do this is does not exist and never will. Change the phone system? Back to hardwire? (which is what this would take to be effective). Who will pay the trillions to the telcos to go back to 1970, technology-wise? See my response to #6 below.
4. Recipients of calls can report them to a National Do Not Call hotline.
Reporting calls from spoofed numbers and your own number will be a disaster.
5. Combine 3 & 4; if enough call recipients report a particular number, it becomes identified as a Commercial Entity.
See response to #3.
6. No more cheap calls for telemarketers: Commercial Entities are charged a significant amount ($0.25 would probably do) for every call they make. Anything over the phone corps’ costs (maybe + modest profit) goes to the Feds to fund this operation.
This is the biggie: too late. VOIP is free. And untraceable. Telemarketers don’t pay one red cent for their operations. A few thousand in computer gear, a small shop in India or similar country that doesn’t police their telcoms, and you’re in business forever. Nobody pays for long distance anymore, save for a few landline users, and that’s because all calls become a data stream over the internet at some point. Stuffing that genie back into the bottle would, at this point, require a worldwide dictatorship to enforce and a couple of trillion dollars in resurrecting 1970’s hardwire technology.
The alternative is going to have to be something akin to the digital signature technology that many businesses and the military use for email. This could be done. There are a lot of political/regulatory (I’m looking at you, Ajit Pai) forces that DO NOT WANT it done. I hope we can find a way there. The current state of affairs is a genuine problem and (here’s the hopeful part) costing business a lot of money. And we know how business feels about that.
The New Green Deal may not be concrete enough for you, but it is a ideational framework that many, if not most, of the democratic primary candidates are building their climate change plans around.
I think a loan forgiveness program needs to be well thought out and impose a lot of rigid quality-based measures on the insitutions themselves. I don’t have any answers here. But frankly, subsidizing ultra-expensive private religious schools and ultra expensive law and med schools attended primarily by the wealthy isn’t at the top of my list of priorities.
My thoughts exactly – but demagogues will demagogue over this one for a while, and will likely keep getting cheered on for doing so.
There are other, better ways to address the very real problem of crippling student loan debt, than blanket loan forgiveness. At that point, why not forgive all debt? Debt is a huge problem for millions of Americans who have never had the privilege of attending college too!
170.
Hoodie
AOC is correct, of course, but who cares about Third Way? Seems like it should be 24/7 “we have a suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator in the White House and the Republican Party refuses to do anything about it,” or “suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator is abusing children in concentration camps and the Republican Party refuses to do anything about it” or “suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator is risking getting us into another stupid war.”
The popularity of the GOP depends almost entirely on Trump except in the reddest of states. Consistently, no one likes GOP policies, so the GOP has been clinging to Trumpian “populism” like a life preserver, and won’t let go of it for any reason whatsoever. That is a potential bonanza for centrist candidates, progressive candidates, hell, any candidate who has an ounce of humanity. Arguments between centrists and progressives (or among progressives) are kind of meaningless right now. It should only be who can take down Trump and be an effective executive. Right now, the best contenders appear to be Warren and Harris, but not because one or the other is particularly progressive or centrist. They just appear to be the more competent candidates. Wilmer sucks not so much because of policies but because he’s an egotistical asshole with dubious party loyalty. Biden is out of touch and a gaffe machine. Most of the rest are not serious contenders. Sure, Obama appealed to a lot of progressives who thought he was more progressive than he really was, but a lot of folks voted for him because the way he ran his campaign indicated that he would be a competent executive, especially considering the context that we were coming off a bungled, unnecessary war in the ME and McCain was doing idiotic crap like “suspending his campaign” for the 2008 economic crisis and making Sarah Palin his running mate.
They separated the children from the adults and now have no where to put them. They are supposed to be in shelter care thru HHS after 72 hours, but they’re incompetent and no one planned anything so they have to bring them back, where they can probably start the clock running again. They may have taken them from one place to another in order to start the clock running again. So they took scared, exhausted, dehydrated children on a series of useless bus rides, to cover their asses.
They didn’t do any planning and now they have hundreds of children in state custody and they can’t care for them, because someone in the Trump Administration didn’t understand that when they put them in a vulnerable position those children became their responsibility. They can’t just release them now. That would be worse.
We have a loan forgiveness program and it works really well. Bankruptcy court. Send it to the experts. People with huge assets or income won’t be able to discharge. It runs great. One legal change and we’re there.
Robert Tracci fucked up the Jason Kessler case through amateur incompetence, failed to secure a conviction of a torch mob Nazi, and gave Chris Cantwell a softball plea despite vast evidence of his crime. https://t.co/7761vYe2ML— Emily of the State (@EmilyGorcenski) June 25, 2019
Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci has formally announced his re-election campaign. He received introductions from Gil Harrington and Sheriff Chip Harding. pic.twitter.com/ehuvHejW5V— Tyler Hammel (@TylerHammelVA) June 25, 2019
The Third Way is trying to claim that they represent mainstream Democrats while mainstream Democrats struggle to remember if they’ve ever heard of them.
The Bros fell for Third Way’s puffery hook, line, and sinker. The only way they could have embarrassed themselves more would have been by citing an Onion article. ?
@Mnemosyne: I haven’t really been paying that much attention, but when I hear “Third way” I mainly think of centrist corporate-tools like Evan Bayh who are mostly useless and have no real constituency. And are best ignored.
178.
Omnes Omnibus
I have to wonder if I am the only person who remembers what left of center politics was like in the late ‘80s in both the US and UK. Conservatism was ascendant Thatcher was riding high and, in the US, Reagan’s colorless VP crushed a traditional liberal politician in the ‘88 election. The Third Way folks were looking for a way to achieve left of center goals and/or preserve existing left of center programs without triggering right wing backlash.
Primarily, the Third Way folks played defense against the right and looked for chances to advance things at the margins. It took Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs to get elected as Democrats or Labour. Twenty to thirty years later, politics have moved on and anyone still pushing those plans is irrelevant. It just wasn’t always so.
179.
FlipYrWhig
@Kent: Well stated. IMHO, and I haven’t thought this out very much so feel free to tell me how stupid it is, I would rather see loan forgiveness tied to various categories of public service / public sector employment, Northern Exposure style. Make some of these state and local government jobs more appealing — e.g. teaching, running a recreation program, being a civil engineer — rather than contributing to the spiral where big debt means needing to chase big money, which is often tied to areas like finance and pharma sales.
There were plenty of folks right here on BJ who were ranting against Ocasio-Cortez when she was a nobody running against Joe Crowley.
As usual, you misremember actual events. People here were thrilled and excited for AOC’s win until she decided to try and tank Sharice Davids’ campaign in Kansas.
I think the “USC” in the tweet is supposed to be the University of South Carolina.
ETA: FWIW, the one in California currently has 5.6% Black students.
186.
Uncle Cosmo
@MattF: I myself am not all that bothered by the Rho Beaux on my non-VOIP landline, though I get about a dozen a day. First, I never answer unless I recognize the Caller-ID number. And sometimes not then. My longish voicemail message informs callers that “we screen calls” & encourages “actual live human beings” to leave a message & a callback # after the beep, as someone may very well standing next to the receiver ready to pick up. Automated robocalls that leave messages tend to start upon answer, so most of their message is lost to the outgoing message.
@The Moar You Know: Yeah, let’s go back to hardwire, & fuck all you VOIPers.//
The big annoyance to me is the caller-ID spoofing – they splice in your home area code & exchange thinking you’ll pick up because it might be a neighbor to tell you your car door is open or your dog has escaped from the yard, etc. Fuckers.
I got a call a few weeks ago that said it was from one of my best friends’ number, & when I picked up it was an unfamiliar woman’s voice & I thought Oh shit, now they’re spoofing the numbers in my phonebook. In fact it was his sister calling to tell me he was in the hospital (nothing super serious fortunately).
187.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mnemosyne: The one in South Kalifornia is commonly known as the University of Spoiled Children.
@Kent: Well stated. IMHO, and I haven’t thought this out very much so feel free to tell me how stupid it is, I would rather see loan forgiveness tied to various categories of public service / public sector employment, Northern Exposure style. Make some of these state and local government jobs more appealing — e.g. teaching, running a recreation program, being a civil engineer — rather than contributing to the spiral where big debt means needing to chase big money, which is often tied to areas like finance and pharma sales.
Yes. But do it fucking right. Not how the Dept of Ed does it by dragging these things out for 20 years. For example, my wife is from Chile and went to medical school down there. In Chile you get your ENTIRE medical education forgiven if you serve in a rural health clinic for 3 years right out of med school. Actually it works kind of the opposite. All medical school graduates are obligated to do a 3-year service in some remote rural clinic and pretty much everyone just does it. The PENALTY if you chose not to do the required rural health service is that you have to pay back the goverment for your medical education which was mostly free in the first place.
In other words, make free or mostly free public education available with the quid-pro-quo that you have a public service obligation afterwards for 2-3 years or so. If you blow off the public service requirement then the total bill comes due. Don’t drag these things out for 20 years with nickel-and-dime tiny annual repayments. Let students get it all out of the way when they are young and then move on with their lives. Don’t require a 20-year public service life to qualify
Congress should not approve more money for CBP until they are allowed to inspect the shelters in person. Full stop.
191.
Aleta
@Kay: Thanks for your observation about the clock restart. About releasing them to relatives, I know it may not be possible, but I based my outrage on Isaac Chotiner’s interview at the NYer with Warren Binford. (A law professor at Willamette University and director of its clinical-law program who was quoted in by many media outlets about the conditions the kids are living in. Her bio. Her group of lawyers interviewed about 50 children at the facility.
Where are these kids from, and where are most of their parents in most cases?
Almost every child that we interviewed had a parent or relative in the United States. Many of them had parents in the United States and were coming here to be with their parents. Some of the children that we interviewed had been separated from their parents. Most of them were separated from other adult relatives. Almost all the children came across with an adult family member and were separated from them by the Border Patrol. Some of them were separated from their parents themselves; other times it was a grandmother or aunt or an older sibling. We don’t know where the parents are being kept.
Also, I bet the administration is not always truthful when it says it can’t do anything to reunite any child with a relative. I know they disregard their responsibility to either keep or turn over records. From a few stories I’ve read, they just leave a lot of the work to nonprofit organizations and relatives already living in the US. organizations.
192.
glory b
@Mandalay: But like Bernie’s plan, hers has nothing for low income folks who need better K-12 educations to get to college.
Primarily, the Third Way folks played defense against the right and looked for chances to advance things at the margins. It took Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs to get elected as Democrats or Labour
Thanks for putting this into perspective.
I also think that a few folks harbored a long resentment against Clinton and Blair for actually getting elected rather than failing, but continuing to be faithful to leftist purity.
There are known cases where CBP used a child in custody to lure undocumented relatives and then arrest them. So then the relatives who could have cared for them are in custody, the kids are *still* in custody, and any kids the relatives had get put into the local system because they are now orphans.
Now relatives in the US are wary of claiming any kids if the relatives don’t already have full US citizenship. ICE has been fucking with green card holders, too.
I do remember it very well. Every boy my age turned into Alex P Keaton and didn’t realize Michael Douglass’ character in Wall St wasn’t someone to emulate. Shit was fucked up and bullshit.
Thanks. I’ve been reading the same things. It was silly to think they were actually “unaccompanied”. They came with adults. The adults may not be their parents but 3 year olds weren’t traveling alone. If they had simply kept the groups together they would have been well within their rights to say the children were the responsibility of the adults the children were with. They don’t really have to analyze that- they don’t have to determine if it’s a relative, whatever, because it doesn’t matter in this context. That probably would have flown. But once they take them? They’re 100% responsible for what happens to them.
They aren’t a state children’s services system so they’re not set up to handle this. But not to know they’re not set up to handle it? That’s inexcusable. They did this to themselves. They took action A which led to result B and now they have a whole set of duties that they’re desperately trying to dodge.
IIRC, Third Way is the remnants of those 90s groups like the DLC and Blue Dog Democrats but weren’t active at the time.
I laugh every time I see a Berniebro sneer about “Blue Dogs in Congress” because that group is dead dead dead. They got wiped out in the 2010 midterms and never recovered.
I think the “USC” in the tweet is supposed to be the University of South Carolina.
Black student popularion – 10% in a state with a 30% Black population
200.
Aleta
@Aleta: U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded facility, citing lack of options
Lack of options. As though they are the lowest order of call center representatives, fielding complaints about an appliance whose warranty doesn’t cover a thing.
They don’t think they should have to be responsible, so they refuse to take responsibility. That’s why you see all of those conservative assholes sneering that it’s all the parents’ fault for bringing the kids here in the first place.
They have no concept that an action of theirs could lead to them becoming responsible for the consequences of that action. None.
I was pleased to see that my grad school alma mater is doing slightly better than average for the area: 7 percent Black students, with a separate listing for students who identify as mixed race:
LMU is geographically close to a lot of heavily Black small cities like Inglewood and Carson, so it makes sense that they would be a draw for kids looking for a commuter school.
204.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Third Way was actually the Blairite term.
Ah, okay. I have to admit that I didn’t follow Blair’s rise and fall very closely.
But overall I agree with you: it’s a political stance that was useful in the 1980s and 1990s, not so useful now.
206.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for the history lesson. I was starting to wonder if anyone but I remembered the mid-to-late 80s. I was indexing both The Guardian (then The Manchester Guardian, that’s how long ago it was) *and* the English-language translation of Pravda (remember that one?!) – and watching the shellacking that both traditional Labour and traditional liberal Democrats were getting during the Reagan/Thatcher Era. Till Bill Clinton and the much-despised centrists and third-wayists came along, the Democrats couldn’t get elected. But now let them be the victims of their own success and wither away!
I style myself as a moderate and even I know the “Third Way” are a bunch of posers, tax-cut obsessives trying to market themselves as Not-Republicans to avoid the stench of racism/sexism that dominates the GOP.
208.
LeftCoastYankee
FWIW, From my experience: Stafford student loans are taken from banks, not the college or university, by the student directly and not the parents.
Those loans are federally guaranteed, so defaulting on them means the Fed Gov pays the bank for them on default.
The banks lobbied hard for increasing the size of loans. And also to be able to offer non-guaranteed loans. They also lobbied for the changes to the bankruptcy laws, making the non-guaranteed loans more “guaranteed”.
I stopped tracking the issue about 10 years ago or so (yup after I rolled them into my mortgage at a much lower interest rate). So it’s probably worse now with less regulation on the lenders.
That’s just the loan side. The overall financial aid process can lead to higher tuition costs which in turn is requiring bigger loans for students.
ICE has enough people to sit in hospital rooms intimidating migrants and nurses; they have enough people to go after immigrants doing business at courts or police stations or med centers or schools, but they don’t have any employees to see that standards are met at detention centers.
I assume ICE still retains the power to make checks on the detention centers? I haven’t seen an identification of the operator of the building whose conditions are in the news. So I hope I’m wrong in wondering if any of the private companies involved in children’s detention (I know there are some) might be operating under similar rules as private prison companies, which limit the information that state authorities can access.
Does ICE do checks on migrant detention centers? Do local authorities? Are ministers or churches allowed in? It seems like a red flag that they cut out classes and activities that allowed in people from the outside. They blamed it on money, but it also prevents reporting on conditions.
210.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Miss Bianca: I think a lot of people also associate “Third Way” and “Blue Dogs” with the conservative Dems who put so many obstacles in Obama’s way, even thought most of them were slightly different kinds of Dems. Southern Conservatives (not Dixiecrats, but not liberals) like Pryor and Lincoln, and old school rural Dems (Truman Democrats? Carter Democrats?) from the upper midwest like Conrad and Dorgan. I would put Evan Bayh and maybe Mary Landrieu and Claire McCaskill in the third way category. (Senators cause they’re better known and easier to remember)
211.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: I just thought of something wrt Third Way Dems. A good number of commenters here are people like Cole and Warren who were once Republicans and switched allegiances as the GOP went ever more bugfuck nuts. They very well may not have experienced that era the way some of us did. Clinton more or less lived up to his promise; Blair started well and then went to shit.
Under Virginia and federal telemarketing laws, those making illegal calls are subject to damages or civil penalties of $500 or more per call. The Complaint alleges that from 2014 to 2017 alone, Cass and his companies made 586,870 unsolicited telemarketing calls just to numbers with Virginia area codes.
$293M. Not bad. Make it so, please.
Everyone should contact their state AG and ask them to follow Herring’s lead.
Cheers,
Scott.
213.
Kathleen
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for providing history and context.
ant: stop answering your phone. voice calls are a 20th century gizmo.
This is so wrong, and shows that some people never leave an urban or otherwise flat environment. Many people who live in geographically challenged areas with major relief to the topography will never be able to depend upon a cell device — they are line of sight only, and not very long range. 5G will be even moreso.
We have smart phones, and the charge last for week and weeks because they’re turned off unless we intend to look something up online or place a call ourselves. At home we have copper land line connection, no one will ever make a cell phone call from our residential area, we’re in what is known as a cove in a hillside, surrounded by ridges and boulders.
We had a contractor once who climbed onto the chimney and held his phone up as high as he could reach — nope, not gonna happen… Neighbors up on the ridge don’t have cell connectivity, out of range from the nearest cell tower.
So get over that landlines are so 20th century — yes they are, but still essential for millions of people all over all the mountains and open plains.
I bet the administration is not always truthful when it says it can’t do anything to reunite any child with a relative.
They are separating children who’ve arrived with an older (as in adult) sibling, an aunt/uncle, or grandparent. Then classifying those children as “unaccompanied”, or at risk of being trafficked. It is just obscenely, Orwellian evil.
217.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: And I thought it went without saying that I don’t think you can both forgive student debt to the tune Warren is suggesting and also ensure free tuition at high quality universities with the faculty/student ratios and research facilities we’ve come to expect. The cost of both goals is high, so you have to set priorities. IMO it makes the most sense to maintain the strength of public institutions and to renegotiate loan repayments instead of canceling them. What generated America’s prosperity in the twentieth century was the extraordinary amount of research done at universities that resulted in new medications, technologies, practices, etc. It’s crazy to squander that tradition by promising the moon. YMMV.
218.
Another Scott
@tobie: As with criticism of Beto, there are lots of details that don’t show up in soundbites.
Warren’s plan would completely wipe out the debt of three-quarters of student loan borrowers, according to her presidential campaign.
It would offer up to $50,000 in student loan cancellation to borrowers with household income of up to $100,000. Borrowers with six-figure incomes would receive graduated loan forgiveness, and those earning more than $250,000 would receive no debt forgiveness.
The proposal would also eliminate tuition at two- and four-year public colleges by creating a partnership between the federal government and states (an idea many GOP governors rejected in 2016). And it would add $100 billion to the Pell Grant program to cover the full cost of college attendance at public institutions.
The cost of the plan would be offset by a proposed tax on the ultrarich that would hit the 75,000 wealthiest families in the U.S. and raise $2.75 trillion over a decade.
Warren argued in a Medium post Monday that a student loan crisis has developed because, as states have disinvested in higher education, students have shouldered more of the costs by taking on debt to attend college. She said her plan recognizes “that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation.”
[…]
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
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rikyrah
This is a pure slay.
BWA HA HA HA HAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Frankensteinbeck
Are there any Third Way legislators? The More-Progressive-Than-Thou Left think Third Way is the dominant Democratic Party organization.
hells littlest angel
Where can I get an Ocasio-Cortez 2028 lawn sign?
Gelfling 545
I just always figured Third Way to be embarrassed Republicans.
matt
I don’t think Republicans going around saying she’s ‘dumb’ is going to be effective.
Dennis
I’m not Third Way, but can we game this out? One-time blanket debt forgiveness can’t be done without a paired free college plan or each new year will create an entirely new crop of graduates with the same burden. And doing debt forgiveness more than once without a free college plan will be a tremendous incentive for colleges to jack up prices even faster without repercussions.
Betty Cracker
EJ Dionne had a column about Third Way last week (I think); I almost wrote a post about it. Apparently there was a meeting of the dinosaurs on the shores of a DC tar pit, and they finally admitted they were wrong to consider markets as a cure-all in the 1990s and even owned that a rising tide had failed to lift all boats! Also, they’re trying to claim President Obama as one of their own. As we used to say back when Third Way was relevant politically (as an inadequate detox to Reaganism/Thatcherism): AS IF!
Chief Oshkosh
AOC was sure right about calling the concentration camps what they are: concentration camps. I define “right” here as both accurate AND politically astute. She’s gotten the conversation going again on what I find to be the worst of the worst of the depravities of the Republicans and the one depravity that even some (not a lot, but some) Trump supporters find troubling. Possibly just as importantly, it’s the one issue that I’ve seen corporate media types give Trump and his ilk fairly repeated pushback on.
We need to keep this on the front burner until all of the kids are rescued and the entire jackbooted apparatus and its individuals are put out of business. Several BJers say they’ve been calling their delegates daily. I’ve been using their online forms because I don’t think I could hold my temper if I talked to a human being who works for my Senators (I lost it last time I called several months ago when the first stories were coming out of Texas). I know, weak on my part. I will have to work up to it by calling someone’s blue Congressperson to at least get into the groove.
Spanky
“& move on”.
ZZING!
Hungry Joe
The GOP and the corporate, centrist Dems are really, really afraid of her. And with good reason: 1) She’s spearheading true social democracy, and 2) everything they sling at her either misses or she deflects back at them with style, humor, and punch.
One of their problems (they have many) is that they keep engaging her on her social media, and she’s better at it than they are. Same for the twisted loons who go after the Parkland kids: They end up with eggy electrons all over their sorry mugs.
Bill K
@Dennis: Oo, look. Someone who actually thought this through. Dennis makes a good point. What is the root cause of the student debt burden? Why is college so expensive? Why does demand not decrease as the price goes up? Waving a wand to cancel existing debt sounds appealing, but does nothing to solve the systemic issues. A starting suggestion – Allow student loans to be considered in bankruptcy again.
Tim C.
@Gelfling 545: I would say it was the old, Northeastern Republicans who had at least some sense that comprimises of some kind must be made to the masses and had zero interest in regulating sex lives of others. They used to run the Republicans; now they are basically the Horace Slughorns of the Political World. Sure, it would be better if they were still running house Slytherin, but they aren’t. And now it’s time for them to choose.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yeah, it’s weird how much attention they get. They seem to do nothing except make statements to the media. That politico report last week about how “corporate Dems” were warming to Elizabeth Warren was all Third Way quotes.
Moderate, blue dogs, and corporate Dems are a thing, but Third Way is all hot air, from what I can tell.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yes. Every now and then I take a look at The Young Turks YouTube channel and stuff from other pro Bernie people. They salivate over this stuff.
I had to leave a comment. I said that it was stupid for Bernie, who has never been a Democrat, to keep insulting the party, or to see it as his responsibility to purify it.
They seem to be intent on pushing the argument that the present party and all the Democratic presidential candidates have failed the legacy of FDR, and only Wilmer can set it right.
This is a grand delusion. I just want someone who will crush Trump.
ThresherK
This freshman Congresscritter has an otherworldly command of pertinent ideas. Well done.
Kay
@Dennis:
No one was paying attention to the issue. I know we won’t get debt forgiveness with Warren. But they have to, have to, respond to what people are worried about.
The funniest part about Third Way and the rest of the centrist groups is they had it all. They had the power to do something. They did nothing until it collapsed. The one and only reason they are speaking out is they are threatened. Why did it take a threat? Why are they so completely out of touch with regular people that they did not notice that college costs were skyrocketing and states were putting more and more of the costs on students? It’s not that they’re “centrist”. It’s that they’re useless. They do bad work.
These are the same people that saw 16% unemployment in 2010 and said “let’s start a campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare!” And were quite successful! The entire elite discussion became about the debt and cutting entitlements.
I mean, CHRIST. They don’t live in this country, in any real way.
Major Major Major Major
James E Powell
Third Way and their ilk have no influence with the public, but they do influence press/media
kindness
Wow, I can feel the heat from that burn from here.
I can’t wait till OAC shifts her gaze to BernieBros. That will be a popcorn event.
Kay
@Bill K:
I actually suggested that to Warren. By email. Which od course she read :)
We already have an expert debt court. It satisfies the people who will be angry if some debt is cancelled and some is not, too. Colleges and universities will scream because they don’t want that kind of risk/reward analysis, but tough shit. They didn’t do anything about it either. Time to fix it. Make it dischargeble in bankruptcy, like all other unsecured debt other than taxes and child support. Get rid of the special status. Done.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
Quoted for truth.
Jude
I rarely disagree with almost anyone around here and am most certainly NOT a centrist, but forgiving college debt DOES seem to help the very affluent. One thing I haven’t heard anyone mention is capping for families that make over, say, $200k/yr. Why should families that make that much or more get debt forgiveness? Aren’t they getting enough perks?
We need to reign in college costs period or have more avenues to free college for families who make less than 100k.
AOC doesn’t seem to be thinking this one through, honestly. And Mr. Bernie ‘The Republicans will see the poll numbers and fall in line’ Sanders never thinks anything through.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator:
And from the other side of their mouth, they’ll tell you that FDR was a racist neoliberal sellout and that his legacy must be replaced with true progressivism, which can only come from one candidate.
A Ghost To Most
So Feisty! Her talk about “concentration camps” has made several talking heads asplode.
I hope her security is solid; she’s drawing a lot of attention from the crazies.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: That’s the real Sanders vs. Warren schism: He thinks the Democratic Party as it exists today must be destroyed and remade in his image to be legitimate, and she believes the current party apparatus can be used to push the kind of structural change needed.
ant
I’m 45 years old, and have never had any college debt.
How about we start with ending the DAILY FUCKING PHONE CALLS being dialed to me about my student debt.
Also, NO I DON”T WANT TO EXTEND THE WARRANTY ON MY CAR! STOP FUCKING CALLING ME EVERY FUCKING DAY.
Major Major Major Major
@Jude:
Which is weird since it’s a core part of Warren’s proposal.
Chyron HR
@kindness:
Uh… yeahhhhhhhhhhh, any day now, I’m sure.
ThresherK
@Jude: “Forgive college debt with a cap limit” sounds good.
Barbara
The answer to college debt isn’t just forgiveness, although that might be part of it. The answer is a change to the bankruptcy laws and other structural changes to how college is priced and paid for. For instance, limiting increases in federal loan guarantees (or however it ends up being regulated) so that colleges can’t simply assure themselves that their tuition can be paid with by loans.
The problem with Third Way is that it makes this statement “oh, it might actually increase inequality!” as a way of shutting down any discussion on the issue, rather than as a way of moving the discussion forward by proposing something they might actually favor in the way of alleviating educational indebtedness. That’s another way of saying, “we actually kind of like the status quo,” which is where the Wall Street sympathy comes into play.
Baud
BTW, since I feel like being a spoilsport, while AOC is good at Twitter burns, this tweet seems unremarkable to me.
ETA: Fixed acronym.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
He has some other vague thing about how it has to be a “movement” or nothing will happen. It feels like it might be a distinct difference but it’s too airy for me.
He has to be worried. He shouldn’t be tanking in the Moveon poll. Can’t go down, has to go up. He’s not even holding.
For all their complaining about the “rigged” primary in ’16 turns out Bernie benefited hugely from the lack of competition.
rikyrah
These muthaphuckas ???
Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) Tweeted:
Breaking on @MSNBC: NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reports 100 migrant children moved out of the Clint, Texas Border Patrol facility, a facility described as “appalling,” have been moved back into that facility. It is unclear where the other children moved out of that facility have gone. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1143547058768556032?s=17
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
You’re showing your age!
trollhattan
@Frankensteinbeck: @Baud:
Agree that they’re manufactured from whole cloth because it’s convenient to have their “fresh ideas for ending partisan gridlock” aired at regular intervals. AOC is probably justified citing Wall Street as the prime funding source and I’ll only add that not only do they have the moolah, they have connections aplenty to ensure bookers get them on the air. And that last bit lends credibility because the networks can claim “We’re representing all valid viewpoints. Look at us!”
In my lifetime we have had one successful third-party candidate: George Wallace. Does anybody wish a do-over of that?
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Fixed.
Barbara
@Kay: Of course he benefited from lack of competition. He is like my friend who won all kinds of science awards in his small high school district who found himself no better than average when he matriculated at a competitive state university. You can actually go pretty far when you are the only one even trying.
Just One More Canuck
@ant: or my air ducts cleaned
Kay
@Jude:
“The Centrists” can’t do this. They can’t be in charge for 30 years, not address any of these issues, and then scream bloody murder when anyone proposes anything. They don’t like it? Fine. Put something else up. And it probably shouldn’t be some convoluted, phased in tax credit bullshit that no one understands and gets so watered down it’s meaningless. It also can’t be limited to poor people because those programs are vulnerable and always under attack. They need a bigger group of people with a stake in it. Democrats used to know this. You put the middle class in front of the poor so when the attacks come the middle class is there defending. That’s the one and only reason some of the programs still exist. They could not take them from middle class people.
If they are losing power they have to look to themselves! They’re responsible for that! Who else would be?
trollhattan
@ant:
The phone has ceased being a useful voice communication device. I seriously don’t know why we keep a land line and I almost never answer my mobile, because perhaps one in ten calls is legit. And now the spam is leaking through to my text. My name is Enrique and I evidently have a one-hundred dollar Amazon gift card as soon as I call this phone number.
Thank you, free market.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: It’s weird to me that we look at higher education only from the side of the consumer and not from the perspective of the cost drivers. It wasn’t that long ago that tuition at public and private universities was affordable for a middle-income family. The Reagan revolution brought with it drastic cuts in federal and state funding for higher education, and the loss of that funding was passed on to the consumer in the form of skyrocketing tuition. I’d like to see that level of state and federal funding restored. It’s actually more important to me than forgiving student debt, though loan modification and renegotiation is obviously needed in some cases.
trollhattan
@Just One More Canuck:
“Did you say duck? Why do I need my ducks cleaned, they clean themselves!”
Wapiti
@Jude: There is a school of thought (or maybe it’s just Atrios) that believes that there’s no need to limit government assistance to how much a family makes IF we have a real progressive income tax structure. If a family earning $200k pays $15k more in annual taxes than a family earning $100k, then the government will recoup the tuition money over time.
patrick II
AOC is the most talented politician I have seen since Obama — and the race isn’t over.
Kathleen
@kindness: What makes you think that’s going to happen?
patrick II
I have read that will hound AOC into unpopularity in the same way Hillary was. I am not so sure. Hillary was nice, and AOC isn’t. And I mean that in the best way possible.
Brachiator
@Jude:
Central to Sanders platform is the insistence that his “progressive” proposals be universal. In some ways he is an old fashioned commie.
randy khan
@trollhattan:
Happy though I am to blame corporate awfulness for anything they do wrong, in fact pretty much all of those calls are coming from criminals. The phone companies hate them, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology until recently it was much, much easier to prevent the calls from being traced (which means you can’t prosecute) than to block them. There is a fix that’s now in the process of being implemented, and the FCC has issued an order which I’d describe as telling phone companies they won’t get in trouble for blocking calls that nobody wants (and, yes, that was a real issue – phone companies are supposed to connect calls, after all), so there’s some hope things will get better.
Another Scott
@Wapiti: As I understand that hobbyhorse of Atrios, his argument is that every time you put a condition on a benefit, you increase paperwork, bureaucracy, friction in the system. So, instead of capping student loan forgiveness for people making over $200K a year, just make it available to everyone and increase the taxes on the well-off to pay for it.
It makes a lot of sense.
But Congress will never give up its power to bestow tax favors, so we’re always going to have at least a hybrid system. And if we have bureaucrats evaluating whether someone qualifies for one type of tax credit/benefit, then it shouldn’t be that much more burdensome for something like this (if it’s structured sensibly).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
ant
the@randy khan:
The numbers are fake. They look like my local area.
Every time it’s a different number.
fuck
Major Major Major Major
@tobie: Providing some level of free nationwide schooling (equivalent to, say, the Cal State level of quality) would do a lot to decrease tuitions elsewhere IMO, since they’d have to justify their prices as a value-add. Obviously this is simplistic, but I see it as sort of a “Medicaid+ for all” deal.
Major Major Major Major
@ant: I stopped answering unknown phone numbers, especially those from my own exchange, a few years ago. It’s hard to say what you could do to crack down on phone number spoofing since it’s super easy, technologically speaking. IANA telecom engineer though.
Kathleen
@Baud: Thank you. I myself am biting my keyboard. I didn’t think Third Way was still a thing. They were a thing and screwed people over. It seems to me now the Dems are working to try to help people. Republicans want to kill us all. Why is Third Way a thing again?
Brachiator
OT. Iran really got under Trump’s skin, they needled the shit out of him, and so he responded like a petulant child
Putin is going to have to calm Trump down again.
hueyplong
Been waiting a while for someone like AOC to start dropping daily quotes for mass consumption from a seat in Congress, and second the breathless anticipation for that magic moment when she turns on a BernieBro.
Today works for me.
Kathleen
@Kay: And no vetting whatsoever.
Mike in NC
Acting head of Customs & Border Protection resigning over the border camps scandal, or as Mrs. Greenspan says “children warehoused in hellholes”.
Mike in NC
@Brachiator: More of his trademark bullshit. Anybody remember the “fire and fury” nonsense with North Korea a couple of years ago?
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
This kind of thinking is central to Wilmer’s view of domestic policy. It’s redistribution fantasy. Oddly enough, the Republicans love this as well. The recent tax law eliminated a number of caps on credits which previously had been limited to the middle class.
And since the wealthy have more recourse to tax avoidance schemes, this policy quickly becomes regressive and a bigger burden on ordinary people.
Wapiti
@Kathleen: From where I sit, “Third Way” looks a lot like “Libertarian”, Republicans who are a little embarrassed or disadvantaged by some Republican dogma, but they’ll vote Republican every time.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t dispute that. I’m interested in how to keep tuition low while maintaining high quality and for that you need the level of state and federal funding you had in the 1960s.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kathleen: They seem to be attempting some kind of relaunch. They were the source of that “The Establishment Loves Warren” article that’s been giving Bernie and Sirota the white hot fantods for the last week or so
FlipYrWhig
Isn’t there a relevant statistic about how much of the burdensome college debt stems from for-profit programs that target people who don’t know how much cheaper community colleges are? I feel like the indebtedness crisis is compounded by the shady quality of the education people are receiving in exchange for that debt.
FlipYrWhig
@Wapiti: I thought “Third Way” was basically “affluent, fiscally conservative, but has at least one married gay friend, votes D and sometimes self-labels as liberal.”
Tim C.
@kindness: I don’t think that’s likely. AOC is probably well aware of the Bernie Bros being a problem, but she’s going for a very similar wedge of the pie so to speak. I would much rather have her than Bernie as the leader of that wing of the party too, so crapping all over them would be likely a mistake.
Shana
@Bill K: Well, one of the causes of college tuition going up is that the states stopped funding their schools at the rates they did through at least 1980. Private schools were always more expensive than state schools but they weren’t $50,000 or more a year, as many are now, compared to the $8-10,000 I paid at the University of Illinois between 1977-1981. And that included all my living expenses.
I’m sure someone else with more knowledge than I possess has already weighed in on all the other reasons.
Major Major Major Major
@Tim C.: She is more or less of the Bernie Bros, just politically adept, so I don’t see her coming for them any time soon either.
@tobie: I thought it went without saying that setting up a free high-quality national education system like the one I suggested would require large federal and state investment.
James E Powell
@Kay:
Their whole purpose is to scream bloody murder when anyone proposes anything. Their core argument – not always stated but certainly communicated – was that FDR & LBJ went too far, too fast. On regulation, on the environment, on workers’ rights, on women’s rights, and most especially on African Americans’ rights.
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: AOC was the one great success of the BernieBro/Our Revolution/Cenk Uygur wing of the party. She hasn’t inherited their worst characteristics. But it might take her a while to turn on them if she ever does.
Aleta
@Mike in NC: Are they shuffling him somewhere else in the stacked deck? So they can announce “We listened to your concerns ! Thank you America! Problem fixed !”
Leto
@tobie:
The cuts were also a direct response to 1) the protests from the students during the Vietnam era and 2) more POC going to college. Conservatives thought if the students had time to protest, they didn’t have enough skin in the game. Cut aid, make them work more. And they’ve always hated the idea of paying for POC anything.
I’m still for debt forgiveness because it’s strangling two generations of people. Need bankruptcy reform too. Debt forgiveness, bankruptcy reform, and state/federal education spending increases.
MomSense
Has anyone actually met a Third Wayer in the wild? I figured it was basically just Michael Bloomberg and an occasional musing at the Morning Joe table.
Shana
@Just One More Canuck: Anybody else get the “Hello. Is Barbara there?” calls? I get them about twice a month and periodically swear a blue streak at them. Doesn’t make a bit of difference of course but I feel better for having doneit.
TomatoQueen
@ant: Look into the call-blocking service called Nomorobo. It works for landlines and is supposed to be available for mobile altho there might be a cost for it. For landlines it’s free, and it works. Comcast had no trouble with adding it in and it makes working at home possible again. The spoofing and phishing and other shenanigans may go on, but with Caller ID monitoring all calls, I can see which ones are valid and which are the clowns threatening to arrest me for owing the IRS. The volume of calls in general has dropped, too.
That said, consider some Luddite behavior. Only certain people get my landline phone number. My cell phone is used only rarely and for limited purposes, and again, nobody gets that number unless needed. I do not own a smart phone, and indeed on the occasions I’ve had to borrow one, I have loathed the damn things, which comes of having what’s called Essential Tremor in my dominant hand, which otherwise sucks. Skype on my home laptop is limited to two people. I do not text anyone or anything for any reason, and will take texts from only one person. Again and again I must emphasize–this is me making the decisions, accepting whatever limits and failures may occur, and unfortunately finding that because I live in Northern Virginia where election activity never ever stops, I’ve had to resort to Nomorobo and found it works. YMMV, but taking back some control of my personal time and also making sure that calls during business hours are work-related or else to do with my small and frail family are worthwhile trades.
Kathleen
@Wapiti: @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Weren’t there also some Lieberman Dem types as well? I was reading this latest invocation as an attack on the old Blue Dog Dems. But I’m also old and have a sinking feeling I’ve totally lost the plot on this thread
Kent
I’ve been thinking about this college cost issue for a long time having had my own student loans as well as one daughter currently in college and two more to come. There are really two ways to make increase subsidizies and reduce the costs of college:
1. Reduce the cost of PUBLIC college education. Some (not all) states have been bleeding higher educatio budgets and pushing more and more costs off onto students. The Federal Government could do a lot to reverse this by increasing subsidies and proving carrot/stick incentives for states to do the same thing. Making public higher education more affordable is really a question of both reducing bloated costs and increasing funding. I don’t think it needs to be free, just much more affordable. And I would oppose any kind of means testing. Just tax the wealthy more to cover improvements to public higher education and they will be paying more anyway. No need for complicated income-based means testing at the other end. We also need to greatly increase investments in higher education in the fast growing suburbs and urban area where most students actually live. Commuter schools and such. Not all students can drop life for 4 years to go off to some flagship university in some small college town in the middle of nowhere.
2. Loan subsidies and forgiveneness. The NYT did an article today. Most student loan debt is actually for high-priced private schools and grad/professional schools. A fairly small percentage is for undergraduate study at public universities. I don’t think there is a compelling public policy objective to creating a massive public subsidy for say the 20,000 students who choose to attend Liberty Baptist University and pour their tuition dollars into the pockets of the Falwell clan. That is EXACTLY what would happen if we turned loans into grants through loan forgiveness. We would in effect be pouring billions of public dollars into the pockets of every kind of evangelical grifter who forms a “university” from Liberty Baptist to Oral Roberts. There are hundreds of them. And this isn’t even getting into the issue of for-profit universities. So I think a loan forgiveness program needs to be well thought out and impose a lot of rigid quality-based measures on the insitutions themselves. I don’t have any answers here. But frankly, subsidizing ultra-expensive private religious schools and ultra expensive law and med schools attended primarily by the wealthy isn’t at the top of my list of priorities.
glory b
@Jude: You are correct. I live in a mostly low income neighborhood, and most of the young people here won’t go t college, or will go to community college. The education they receive in high school isn’t usually good enough to qualify them for most colleges and universities.
So, what this would mean would be a huge economic enefit for the middle to upper classes andlittle or nothing for them.
I read an article a while back abut a European country (Scotland?) that tried free college with no other changes and came to the conclusion that it was a huge windfall for the middle and wealthier classes, paid for in a significant part by the lower classes. If I recall correctly. it was paid for by an across the board tax increase. But, it didn’t make it easier for the more poorly educated to gain admission.
Shana
@Brachiator: I saw earlier that Russia has weighed in and said that the drone was in Iranian airspace.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Opposing means testing of benefits, to the extent that you can, is good. The more people a redistributive program benefits, the more popular it will be. The other side is always going to want to put in some sharp cutoff so they can then divide people and conquer.
That said, a cap on a benefit for rich people is one of the gentler kinds of limit you can have.
rikyrah
About the Erase College Debt Plan…another way of looking at it:
rikyrah
Trump/Pence 2020:
The cruelty is the point
EVERY Democratic Candidate needs to be saying this on tv, 24/7/365
Mandalay
@Bill K:
Cuddly Uncle Joe, who never met a lender he didn’t milk, would prefer that we talk about something else:
Warren is going to slaughter Biden on this, and she won’t need to do any research. She knows this shit inside out and backwards.
trollhattan
China goin’ down against Italy. Unless Japan wins later today it’s US v Europe the rest of the way.
TenguPhule
@Tim C.:
They choose to be Deatheaters. Without a shred of hesitation.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah:
I only wish this wouldn’t encourage their supporters.
TomatoQueen
@Kathleen: Joe Lieberman, before exposure as Mr Splinters in his Backside, was a Democratic Senator from Connecticut. He was, during Clinton, referred to as the Conscience of the Senate. This made people from New Haven laff and laff.
TenguPhule
@Mike in NC:
They took 100 children out of one of those hellholes. Then PUT THEM BACK IN.
CBP’s excuse? THEY HAVE NO MORE FUCKING ROOM ANYWHERE ELSE.
Prison isn’t appropriate for this atrocity. This is what the Death Penalty was always meant for.
Patricia Kayden
Talking about fierce women, how many more have to come forward before the media takes their charges against Trump seriously?
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1143534771961835522
We have a serial harasser in the White House.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: There is never going to be reconciliation over this. Never.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Feature, not a bug.
They’re political grifters out to make easy money from suckers, not legitimate organizations trying to improve other people’s lives.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steve in the ATL: Admit it, you miss the free coasters.
jl
@rikyrah: That is a good point. Plans for free tuition typically include community, junior college, and technical school. AOC emphasizes those schools need to be included in a free tuition plan. Something to keep in mind when looking at different plans for debt reduction and forgiveness.
germy
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@glory b: @rikyrah: that’s why I’m skeptical of these plans, but
this demo have (even more) amplified voices among the internet/twitter left. “Everyone I know” went to college, and/or plans to send their kids.
rikyrah
@TenguPhule:
They think somebody’s playing with them. They think that they are phucking slick.
And, I still wanna know if their tracking system has gotten better than my local cleaners.
germy
matt
Bruenig sucks dog dicks.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah:
I will bet that they still have no official tracking system at CBP. Records would mean personnel could be held accountable. its the one thing they learned from the Nazis.
germy
I didn’t know wealthy people took out loans for their kids’ college. I didn’t know wealthy people qualified for loans for their kids’ college.
Brachiator
@Patricia Kayden:
It’s not about the media. Trump supporters will never take these charges seriously. Trump has been absolved of all crimes because he is giving the right wing everything they always wanted.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah:
This smells wrong. Googling I see OSU is 69% white, Alabama 78%, OSU 69%, USC 40%. Am I misreading something?
germy
TS (the original)
@Mike in NC: Is there any organisation in trump’s administration that has a head – rather than an acting head?
Brachiator
@germy:
They don’t. And the wealthy have access to Section 529 tuition plans that let them accumulate tax free college funds.
And obviously, these plans are available to everyone, but the rich have an easier time funding them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy:
In Chicago, in the machine days, they called those ghost jobs, you didn’t even have to show up you just got paid
Kathleen O'Neill
@TomatoQueen: I could not stand the man and was pissed when Gore chose him for VP.
Mandalay
@Gelfling 545:
Hardly. There were plenty of folks right here on BJ who were ranting against Ocasio-Cortez when she was a nobody running against Joe Crowley.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I need
onetwo of those!germy
@Brachiator:
Then I don’t understand all the “eliminating college loan debt is a giveaway to wealthy parents” arguments. ?
trollhattan
@Mandalay:
Who?
And who’s Joe Crowley?
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: my family is quite comfortable and I had undergrad loans. Wealthy people aren’t eligible for like, subsidized Stafford loans, but those aren’t the only kinds of loans.
MattF
@germy: Note that Hugh Hewitt is moving up the RW ladder to head the Nixon Foundation.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Not necessarily true. There are, of course, fewer ultra wealthy people, so you may be talking more about influence, not popularity. And the federal revenue is not an endless cornucopia. Trump’s tax cuts, which expand numerous tax benefits to the wealthy, has exploded the budget deficit.
Also, in order to pay for all these maximum super duper benefits, you must increase the taxes on middle income people as well as the wealthy.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Really? I mostly remember people thinking she was an impressive campaigner and very few people knowing who Crowley was– which also seemed to be true in his district and that was the problem.
But we all know how important it is to you to see yourself as both a prophet and a martyr, so… bleat on.
germy
Jim, Foolish Literalist
twitter Nixon is gonna psuedonymously plotz
Kathleen
@Patricia Kayden: Media won’t take this seriously until ther handlers determine Trump is no longer useful. When it ‘s time for Trump to leave office we will hear about ot.
scav
@patrick II: Well, maybe as a campaigner, but there’s more to being a politician. Getting the gears and houses and snakepits et al to grind (in the proper direction no less) is another important skill. (Pelosi fits as stromg here). She may get there, but a part of that skill comes from working the coalface itself. Merely winning elections is snazzy policial vaporware, and even highlighting issues without subsequent action isn’t much more (youtube influencers can manage that). Time will tell about the other dimensions.
Uncle Cosmo
@ant: I have some ideas about how to end the robocalls:
1. The Do Not Call list becomes opt-out, not opt in. No calls from commercial entities unless you specify them (e.g., company you buy stuff from). Big-$$$ penalties for violation.
2. Everyone gets Caller ID.
3. Caller-ID spoofing (i.e., call is not from the number Caller-ID reports) also gets pricey penalties. If the technology to do this isn’t around yet, either invent it or change the phone system to permit it. (One day I got half a dozen calls that said they were from my land-line, which is the number I was answering on!)
4. Recipients of calls can report them to a National Do Not Call hotline.
5. Combine 3 & 4; if enough call recipients report a particular number, it becomes identified as a Commercial Entity.
6. No more cheap calls for telemarketers: Commercial Entities are charged a significant amount ($0.25 would probably do) for every call they make. Anything over the phone corps’ costs (maybe + modest profit) goes to the Feds to fund this operation.
Probably details to be worked out, but the basic idea is to charge & fine these bastards enough so telemarketing is no longer economically viable. That’ll stop it toot-sweet.
(FTR I hear the msg about “your student loan” & laugh my arse off – that was 50 yrs ago & I too never had any student debt.)
Brachiator
@germy:
The wealthy get to maximize benefits they already enjoy. Maybe use the 529 money for graduate school (unless Wilmer’s nutty plan will apply to every kind of higher education) or use the extra cash freed up for a vacation.
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
University of Alabama – 10% Black in a state with a 27% Black population
The Ohio State University – 5.3% Black
USC is a private school.
Asians 16.8%
Black/African-American 5.6%
Hispanic 14.8%
White/Caucasian 30.7%
International 23.9%
Other 8.1%
I would have used UCLA. …..
Among the nearly 25,300 U.S undergraduates there, about 39% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 31% are white, 20% are Latino and 4% are black, according to last fall’s statistics.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: isn’t it that a lot of student loan debt is held by upper middle class types, not the wealthy per se?
@rikyrah: if the author meant ‘black’ they shouldn’t have written ‘minority’, then. I don’t see how else you get 5%.
glory b
@Major Major Major Major: As I recall, she traveled with Bernie after she won her primary, campaigning for other challengers he was endorsing.
I believe they had limited success. It feels like she is kind of withdrawing from that circle.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kay: Alte kakkers like Wilmer are obsessed with “movements” – usually bowel movements. And “bowel movement” may be the truest description available of his candidacy.
MattF
@Uncle Cosmo: I use Nomorobo, and it works pretty well. It’s free on a VoIP landline.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Really, I mostly remember people here not knowing who she was until she won.
Or maybe I just missed those comments because I didn’t know who she was.
Kent
@Mandalay:
Seriously? I don’t recall a single BJ conversation supporting Crowley and bemoaning the fact that he was being challenged from the left in a safe Dem district. Really? I don’t come close to reading every BJ thread but I call BS on this.
joel hanes
@patrick II:
Stacey Abrams
germy
@scav: Did you see her questioning Michael Cohen?
Watch her during hearings. Her questions make it obvious she’s doing the hard work and research.
Compare her to the more experienced politicians who use their time to make speeches. (During one hearing, I saw Klobuchar use her time to make what sounded like a campaign commercial, touting her “reaching across the aisle” to “accomplish things” rather than using her time to get useful information out of the person she was questioning.)
germy
@joel hanes: Abrams is inspiring. She is one of the best we have.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: You know that the vast majority of private colleges are not like Liberty University, don’t you?
I don’t have a problem with you not wanting to subsidize expensive private colleges. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I can see the point. Just be aware that you are more likely to be cutting off funds for Oberlins and Reeds than Libertys and Regents.
TenguPhule
Get right the fuck out of here.
eldorado
ant: stop answering your phone. voice calls are a 20th century gizmo.
Gex
@Jude: My thinking is that the taxes to pay for universal college tuition and student loan relief will primarily be coming from those families. So they will be getting something on one hand, but giving much of it back on the other.
The benefit of universal college tuition and student loan relief relates to the set of stakeholders who benefit from the policy. We can already see right now that those at risk of being excluded from the policy are not terribly supportive of it.
ETA: This is not me endorsing it necessarily. It’s just me pointing out the stakeholders consideration.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
For whatever it’s worth UCLA is the hardest UC to enter. I believe our Martin can expand here.
Berkeley is second.
lee
How would college debt forgiveness is limited to families that make under $200k work?
My kid is going to graduate next May & let’s say she has some college debt. Once she gets out she is on her own & she’ll probably not make $200k. So through a bankruptcy court she can get that debt forgiven if she needed to file BK?
So this forgiveness would apply to everyone but the small percentage of graduates that get out and make $200k?
TenguPhule
@Kent:
Its true. Mainly because she had terrible taste in associates. Sanders supporters and an incompetent adviser.
Kent
I will be more likely to support loan forgiveness when it can be explained to me how it would not result in a multi-billion dollar direct Federal subsidy for the evangelical religious right. There are currently about 600 religious colleges in this country. Many of them are Catholic like Notre Dame and Gonzaga. Some are Baptist like Baylor and Wake Forest. Many are mostly religious in name only like SMU. But there are also hundreds that are hard-core right-wing evangelical institutions like Liberty Baptist, Oral Roberts, and Regent U. And dozens more that have lower national profiles but are basically the projects of right-wing Evangelical churches and profit centers for Evangelical grifters like the Falwell family.
If you create a loan forgiveness program or turn existing loans into grants then you are basically creating a firehose of Public dollars straight into all those right wing Evangelical institutions. Billions of public dollars. The grifting would be enormous.
Explain to me how to create a loan forgiveness program that doesn’t amount to a MASSIVE public subsidy for those schools and directly into the pockets of those Evangelical grifters and I’ll be more inclined to get on board.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Not sure. A random Google search found this.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-loan-debt/
satby
@tobie: I linked to this before, this made a lot of sense to me: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/06/is-student-debt-cancellation-regressive-no
divF
@Shana: My favorites are the ones in Chinese.
TenguPhule
@Kent:
Decertify them as educational institutions. Just like Trump U.
Gelfling 545
@Tim C.: “The Horace Slughorns of the political world”. Love it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@rikyrah: U$C is a private school.
lee
@Kent: I do remember some comments. Nothing too dramatic. Most were of a ‘interesting to see what happens in this safe district’ type.
Aleta
U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded facility, citing lack of options
WaPo
(After they announced this a,m, that they had moved more than 300 children out of that facility. Either they lied about the number, or 100 kids were bussed away and then bussed back.)
scav
@germy: I’m not saying she doesn’t have skills or potential. I’m just a bit tired of the seemingly continual round of the latest greatest young savior that will fix all if only elected. Beto, Buttigieg, how many others? Well, that and the seeming reduction of political skill to campaigning prowess. But I’m personally not going to crown anyone best politician until they’ve put some time in the sausage making and produced some actual salumi.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator: she released a very well made video late in the primary that went viral, and I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t front-paged her, and linked to several times.
@TenguPhule: was that during her own primary, or the subsequent and extremely premature, and largely unsuccessful “We are all sosh’lists now!” victory tour she went on with Sanders?
Brachiator
OT. Trump is looking for a new Minister of Cruelty to Children
Kay
“And I, a reasonable centrist, offer absolutely nothing in response to either the Sanders or the Warren plan except some stern scolding”
They’re professional critics. If they’re not scolding the public they’re scolding politicians. How long were they planning on letting this go on? Forever. The level of debt would just rise forever. We’re at full employment. If it isn’t going down now it isn’t going to go down. They did nothing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Meanwhile, Brave Brave Sir Willard has declared his brow furrowed.
Kent
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m actually a Reed graduate. Reed has a $600 million endowment and Oberlin’s is approaching $1 billion so those are not perhaps the best examples. And yes, I have thought about this a lot. Rather than direct Federal subsidizies for private schools through a program that essentially converts student loans into grants, I’d be much more supportive of a new program of private-public partnerships that private colleges can tap into. Take Reed College, for example. It is located in suburban Portland. Rather than subsidizing ultra-wealthy students from the Bay Area and New York to study the classics at Reed (yes, I went there, that’s what goes on), we could look at where higher education is coming up short in the Portland area and provide incentives for Reed to create new quasi-public degree programs to serve a wider population than the elite few that attend Reed (mostly from out of state). Create some new Federally subsidized STEM or Bioscience program there or Computer Science that is publically subsidized and open to a wider range of local HS students to attend and take advantage of what Reed has to offer. If Reed doesn’t want to do that then fine, the money can go to Lewis and Clark or University of Portland or one of the other local private schools.
If Liberty Baptist wants to tap into Federal dollars they could do the same thing. Open up a public/private partnership program on their campus that follows all Federal rules on things like discrimination, LGBT rights, etc. Are they likely to do this? Probably not. But there are a LOT of small struggling private colleges around the country who would probably jump at the idea to create public/private partnerships and create new programs on their campus to serve local students who need more options.
Just saying, there are lots of creative ways to subsidize private/public education without it being just an uncontrolled subsidy for the religious right.
patrick II
@joel hanes:
Stacey Abrams.
Fair point.
Aleta
@Aleta:
Betty
@Kay: Well said! So happy to see some real policy changes being proposed.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Bill Cosby would like a word. He’s wondering why there’s a lower standard for the President of the United States.
If Trump were a comedian this would be a career-ender. Since he’s President of the United States it’s not.
It’s turned into this amazing job where there’s absolute blanket immunity. I don’t know- could the founders have intended this? Only if they were insane.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Reminds me of those bumper stickers that used to be everywhere:
Major Major Major Major
@divF:
Apparently those are part of a big international scam to defraud Chinese-Americans.
plato
trollhattan
@lee:
IIRC when congress “improved” bankruptcy law by making it harder for individuals to access it, they also removed student debt as a forgivable debt.
Hopefully somebody more lawyerly than I can verify/correct/mock my “facts.”
TenguPhule
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The aftermath of the primary mostly. But I do remember a few heckles because she was challenging as part of the Bernie crowd.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Yep.
There are exceptions, however, namely if certain conditions regarding financial hardship are met.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/18/bankruptcy-student-loans/
gvg
@rikyrah: Don’t insist on perfect legislation. The democratic coalition has to stick together to have the votes to get anything at any time not just now. This does mean the white middle class democratic voters should also expect to vote yes on some things that benefit POC more than themselves, however their are black and other minority families that WILL benefit from college cost reforms (to lump a bunch of stuff together). The minorities that do manage to go to college tend to have higher debt too.
The college cost debt issue is pretty complicated, has multiple causes and effects vary a lot. As a University Financial Aid Counselor for over 20 years, I’d like to point some things out. States impact costs much more than the Feds do. The local economy impacts it too. Different states right next to each other cost very different amounts due to the accumulation of decades of choices from the college itself and the state governments. Then many students attend and make choices for themselves and have different luck in employment. You end up with people in all different kinds of situations that don’t sound anything like what you (or I) experienced. A real solution will have to be multipronged and some of it will have nothing to do with you. Some of it will or at least your younger relatives though.
I’d like to see state funding go back up to where a state school at any of the types (vocational, jr college or University) get back to something people can afford by working, minimum wage to go back up to cost of living, some kind of debt forgiveness to be worked out, and also properly fund preK through 12 without false school grade punishment and test nonsense do that the poor are actually getting a fair good education and a chance. I don’t know how to get there. All I have is an ear for more of the same doesn’t work bulls* that got us to where we are.
MattF
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ll note that Graham (apparently) didn’t say that he believes what Trump said.
Kay
Since Ivanka blows off real questions, like the super-special person that she is, should they continue to cover her self-promoting marketing events? They have some leverage here. They could use it. There’s no public value to printing pictures of her in a hard hat. They should get something in exchange.
Aleta
@Aleta: Lies. + Using children’s lives to blackmail. Horrendous incompetency. + Using the threat of more child deaths as pressure to get money to use for more corruption. And they refuse to accept and distribute diapers and supplies and clean clothes that people are trying to drop off at the building.
No other options? Reunite them with relatives, set their parents free, apologize and compensate. Haul in whoever is running the facility. Make every guard and official who went inside testify under oath. Subpoena any official at ICE and CBP who gave an order or signed a paper to do with this facility. Make them wait for weeks in a crowded moldy building with no windows, showers, clean clothes or contact with the outside.
BJ meetups
The Moar You Know
@Uncle Cosmo:
First, I agree – we deal with hundreds of these at my workplace every month and they not only are not stopping, they are increasing in frequency. I get at least ten a day on my cell. It’s intolerable. Now let me tear your ideas to shreds:
Congress had this option and fought it to the death. They know where their campaign contributions come from. It’s not you.
A good idea. It’s available everywhere and very few don’t have it anymore, but it should be free and available to all.
The technology to do this is does not exist and never will. Change the phone system? Back to hardwire? (which is what this would take to be effective). Who will pay the trillions to the telcos to go back to 1970, technology-wise? See my response to #6 below.
Reporting calls from spoofed numbers and your own number will be a disaster.
See response to #3.
This is the biggie: too late. VOIP is free. And untraceable. Telemarketers don’t pay one red cent for their operations. A few thousand in computer gear, a small shop in India or similar country that doesn’t police their telcoms, and you’re in business forever. Nobody pays for long distance anymore, save for a few landline users, and that’s because all calls become a data stream over the internet at some point. Stuffing that genie back into the bottle would, at this point, require a worldwide dictatorship to enforce and a couple of trillion dollars in resurrecting 1970’s hardwire technology.
The alternative is going to have to be something akin to the digital signature technology that many businesses and the military use for email. This could be done. There are a lot of political/regulatory (I’m looking at you, Ajit Pai) forces that DO NOT WANT it done. I hope we can find a way there. The current state of affairs is a genuine problem and (here’s the hopeful part) costing business a lot of money. And we know how business feels about that.
patrick II
@scav:
The New Green Deal may not be concrete enough for you, but it is a ideational framework that many, if not most, of the democratic primary candidates are building their climate change plans around.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kent:
My thoughts exactly – but demagogues will demagogue over this one for a while, and will likely keep getting cheered on for doing so.
There are other, better ways to address the very real problem of crippling student loan debt, than blanket loan forgiveness. At that point, why not forgive all debt? Debt is a huge problem for millions of Americans who have never had the privilege of attending college too!
Hoodie
AOC is correct, of course, but who cares about Third Way? Seems like it should be 24/7 “we have a suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator in the White House and the Republican Party refuses to do anything about it,” or “suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator is abusing children in concentration camps and the Republican Party refuses to do anything about it” or “suspected rapist and admitted sexual predator is risking getting us into another stupid war.”
The popularity of the GOP depends almost entirely on Trump except in the reddest of states. Consistently, no one likes GOP policies, so the GOP has been clinging to Trumpian “populism” like a life preserver, and won’t let go of it for any reason whatsoever. That is a potential bonanza for centrist candidates, progressive candidates, hell, any candidate who has an ounce of humanity. Arguments between centrists and progressives (or among progressives) are kind of meaningless right now. It should only be who can take down Trump and be an effective executive. Right now, the best contenders appear to be Warren and Harris, but not because one or the other is particularly progressive or centrist. They just appear to be the more competent candidates. Wilmer sucks not so much because of policies but because he’s an egotistical asshole with dubious party loyalty. Biden is out of touch and a gaffe machine. Most of the rest are not serious contenders. Sure, Obama appealed to a lot of progressives who thought he was more progressive than he really was, but a lot of folks voted for him because the way he ran his campaign indicated that he would be a competent executive, especially considering the context that we were coming off a bungled, unnecessary war in the ME and McCain was doing idiotic crap like “suspending his campaign” for the 2008 economic crisis and making Sarah Palin his running mate.
Kay
@Aleta:
They separated the children from the adults and now have no where to put them. They are supposed to be in shelter care thru HHS after 72 hours, but they’re incompetent and no one planned anything so they have to bring them back, where they can probably start the clock running again. They may have taken them from one place to another in order to start the clock running again. So they took scared, exhausted, dehydrated children on a series of useless bus rides, to cover their asses.
They didn’t do any planning and now they have hundreds of children in state custody and they can’t care for them, because someone in the Trump Administration didn’t understand that when they put them in a vulnerable position those children became their responsibility. They can’t just release them now. That would be worse.
Kay
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
We have a loan forgiveness program and it works really well. Bankruptcy court. Send it to the experts. People with huge assets or income won’t be able to discharge. It runs great. One legal change and we’re there.
rikyrah
The level of hatred in this???
Corbin Hiar (@CorbinHiar) Tweeted:
To avoid flying a gay pride flag on federal property, the Trump administration gifted the flag and flagpole outside the Stonewall National Monument to the New York Parks department, internal emails show. https://t.co/4iakYguSQ0 https://twitter.com/CorbinHiar/status/1143238432615014400?s=17
Jay
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The Third Way is trying to claim that they represent mainstream Democrats while mainstream Democrats struggle to remember if they’ve ever heard of them.
The Bros fell for Third Way’s puffery hook, line, and sinker. The only way they could have embarrassed themselves more would have been by citing an Onion article. ?
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Great article, thanks!
Kent
@Mnemosyne: I haven’t really been paying that much attention, but when I hear “Third way” I mainly think of centrist corporate-tools like Evan Bayh who are mostly useless and have no real constituency. And are best ignored.
Omnes Omnibus
I have to wonder if I am the only person who remembers what left of center politics was like in the late ‘80s in both the US and UK. Conservatism was ascendant Thatcher was riding high and, in the US, Reagan’s colorless VP crushed a traditional liberal politician in the ‘88 election. The Third Way folks were looking for a way to achieve left of center goals and/or preserve existing left of center programs without triggering right wing backlash.
Primarily, the Third Way folks played defense against the right and looked for chances to advance things at the margins. It took Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs to get elected as Democrats or Labour. Twenty to thirty years later, politics have moved on and anyone still pushing those plans is irrelevant. It just wasn’t always so.
FlipYrWhig
@Kent: Well stated. IMHO, and I haven’t thought this out very much so feel free to tell me how stupid it is, I would rather see loan forgiveness tied to various categories of public service / public sector employment, Northern Exposure style. Make some of these state and local government jobs more appealing — e.g. teaching, running a recreation program, being a civil engineer — rather than contributing to the spiral where big debt means needing to chase big money, which is often tied to areas like finance and pharma sales.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: You with your history and shit.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah: on the bright side, the gay agenda got a free flagpole out of it.
glory b
@rikyrah: Amen!
Panurge
@trollhattan:
Considering that this time George Wallace would split the Republican vote, we just might!
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
As usual, you misremember actual events. People here were thrilled and excited for AOC’s win until she decided to try and tank Sharice Davids’ campaign in Kansas.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
I think the “USC” in the tweet is supposed to be the University of South Carolina.
ETA: FWIW, the one in California currently has 5.6% Black students.
Uncle Cosmo
@MattF: I myself am not all that bothered by the Rho Beaux on my non-VOIP landline, though I get about a dozen a day. First, I never answer unless I recognize the Caller-ID number. And sometimes not then. My longish voicemail message informs callers that “we screen calls” & encourages “actual live human beings” to leave a message & a callback # after the beep, as someone may very well standing next to the receiver ready to pick up. Automated robocalls that leave messages tend to start upon answer, so most of their message is lost to the outgoing message.
@The Moar You Know: Yeah, let’s go back to hardwire, & fuck all you VOIPers.//
The big annoyance to me is the caller-ID spoofing – they splice in your home area code & exchange thinking you’ll pick up because it might be a neighbor to tell you your car door is open or your dog has escaped from the yard, etc. Fuckers.
I got a call a few weeks ago that said it was from one of my best friends’ number, & when I picked up it was an unfamiliar woman’s voice & I thought Oh shit, now they’re spoofing the numbers in my phonebook. In fact it was his sister calling to tell me he was in the hospital (nothing super serious fortunately).
Uncle Cosmo
@Mnemosyne: The one in South Kalifornia is commonly known as the University of Spoiled Children.
Kent
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes. But do it fucking right. Not how the Dept of Ed does it by dragging these things out for 20 years. For example, my wife is from Chile and went to medical school down there. In Chile you get your ENTIRE medical education forgiven if you serve in a rural health clinic for 3 years right out of med school. Actually it works kind of the opposite. All medical school graduates are obligated to do a 3-year service in some remote rural clinic and pretty much everyone just does it. The PENALTY if you chose not to do the required rural health service is that you have to pay back the goverment for your medical education which was mostly free in the first place.
In other words, make free or mostly free public education available with the quid-pro-quo that you have a public service obligation afterwards for 2-3 years or so. If you blow off the public service requirement then the total bill comes due. Don’t drag these things out for 20 years with nickel-and-dime tiny annual repayments. Let students get it all out of the way when they are young and then move on with their lives. Don’t require a 20-year public service life to qualify
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Mnemosyne: Yup.
Tho I also recall a few other people questioning whether she could win her D+1000 district in the general, since they perceived her as so extreme…
Mnemosyne
@Aleta:
Congress should not approve more money for CBP until they are allowed to inspect the shelters in person. Full stop.
Aleta
@Kay: Thanks for your observation about the clock restart. About releasing them to relatives, I know it may not be possible, but I based my outrage on Isaac Chotiner’s interview at the NYer with Warren Binford. (A law professor at Willamette University and director of its clinical-law program who was quoted in by many media outlets about the conditions the kids are living in. Her bio. Her group of lawyers interviewed about 50 children at the facility.
Also, I bet the administration is not always truthful when it says it can’t do anything to reunite any child with a relative. I know they disregard their responsibility to either keep or turn over records. From a few stories I’ve read, they just leave a lot of the work to nonprofit organizations and relatives already living in the US. organizations.
glory b
@Mandalay: But like Bernie’s plan, hers has nothing for low income folks who need better K-12 educations to get to college.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Cosmo:
I know, and, respectfully, fuck you. CNTV ‘92.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks for putting this into perspective.
I also think that a few folks harbored a long resentment against Clinton and Blair for actually getting elected rather than failing, but continuing to be faithful to leftist purity.
Mnemosyne
@Aleta:
There are known cases where CBP used a child in custody to lure undocumented relatives and then arrest them. So then the relatives who could have cared for them are in custody, the kids are *still* in custody, and any kids the relatives had get put into the local system because they are now orphans.
Now relatives in the US are wary of claiming any kids if the relatives don’t already have full US citizenship. ICE has been fucking with green card holders, too.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
I do remember it very well. Every boy my age turned into Alex P Keaton and didn’t realize Michael Douglass’ character in Wall St wasn’t someone to emulate. Shit was fucked up and bullshit.
Kay
@Aleta:
Thanks. I’ve been reading the same things. It was silly to think they were actually “unaccompanied”. They came with adults. The adults may not be their parents but 3 year olds weren’t traveling alone. If they had simply kept the groups together they would have been well within their rights to say the children were the responsibility of the adults the children were with. They don’t really have to analyze that- they don’t have to determine if it’s a relative, whatever, because it doesn’t matter in this context. That probably would have flown. But once they take them? They’re 100% responsible for what happens to them.
They aren’t a state children’s services system so they’re not set up to handle this. But not to know they’re not set up to handle it? That’s inexcusable. They did this to themselves. They took action A which led to result B and now they have a whole set of duties that they’re desperately trying to dodge.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
IIRC, Third Way is the remnants of those 90s groups like the DLC and Blue Dog Democrats but weren’t active at the time.
I laugh every time I see a Berniebro sneer about “Blue Dogs in Congress” because that group is dead dead dead. They got wiped out in the 2010 midterms and never recovered.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
Black student popularion – 10% in a state with a 30% Black population
Aleta
@Aleta: U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded facility, citing lack of options
Lack of options. As though they are the lowest order of call center representatives, fielding complaints about an appliance whose warranty doesn’t cover a thing.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
You got that right.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
They don’t think they should have to be responsible, so they refuse to take responsibility. That’s why you see all of those conservative assholes sneering that it’s all the parents’ fault for bringing the kids here in the first place.
They have no concept that an action of theirs could lead to them becoming responsible for the consequences of that action. None.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
I was pleased to see that my grad school alma mater is doing slightly better than average for the area: 7 percent Black students, with a separate listing for students who identify as mixed race:
https://www.lmu.edu/about/factsfigures/
LMU is geographically close to a lot of heavily Black small cities like Inglewood and Carson, so it makes sense that they would be a draw for kids looking for a commuter school.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Third Way was actually the Blairite term.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ah, okay. I have to admit that I didn’t follow Blair’s rise and fall very closely.
But overall I agree with you: it’s a political stance that was useful in the 1980s and 1990s, not so useful now.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for the history lesson. I was starting to wonder if anyone but I remembered the mid-to-late 80s. I was indexing both The Guardian (then The Manchester Guardian, that’s how long ago it was) *and* the English-language translation of Pravda (remember that one?!) – and watching the shellacking that both traditional Labour and traditional liberal Democrats were getting during the Reagan/Thatcher Era. Till Bill Clinton and the much-despised centrists and third-wayists came along, the Democrats couldn’t get elected. But now let them be the victims of their own success and wither away!
@Brachiator: Yeah, and that.
PaulWartenberg
I style myself as a moderate and even I know the “Third Way” are a bunch of posers, tax-cut obsessives trying to market themselves as Not-Republicans to avoid the stench of racism/sexism that dominates the GOP.
LeftCoastYankee
FWIW, From my experience: Stafford student loans are taken from banks, not the college or university, by the student directly and not the parents.
Those loans are federally guaranteed, so defaulting on them means the Fed Gov pays the bank for them on default.
The banks lobbied hard for increasing the size of loans. And also to be able to offer non-guaranteed loans. They also lobbied for the changes to the bankruptcy laws, making the non-guaranteed loans more “guaranteed”.
I stopped tracking the issue about 10 years ago or so (yup after I rolled them into my mortgage at a much lower interest rate). So it’s probably worse now with less regulation on the lenders.
That’s just the loan side. The overall financial aid process can lead to higher tuition costs which in turn is requiring bigger loans for students.
Aleta
@Mnemosyne: Good point.
ICE has enough people to sit in hospital rooms intimidating migrants and nurses; they have enough people to go after immigrants doing business at courts or police stations or med centers or schools, but they don’t have any employees to see that standards are met at detention centers.
I assume ICE still retains the power to make checks on the detention centers? I haven’t seen an identification of the operator of the building whose conditions are in the news. So I hope I’m wrong in wondering if any of the private companies involved in children’s detention (I know there are some) might be operating under similar rules as private prison companies, which limit the information that state authorities can access.
Does ICE do checks on migrant detention centers? Do local authorities? Are ministers or churches allowed in? It seems like a red flag that they cut out classes and activities that allowed in people from the outside. They blamed it on money, but it also prevents reporting on conditions.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Miss Bianca: I think a lot of people also associate “Third Way” and “Blue Dogs” with the conservative Dems who put so many obstacles in Obama’s way, even thought most of them were slightly different kinds of Dems. Southern Conservatives (not Dixiecrats, but not liberals) like Pryor and Lincoln, and old school rural Dems (Truman Democrats? Carter Democrats?) from the upper midwest like Conrad and Dorgan. I would put Evan Bayh and maybe Mary Landrieu and Claire McCaskill in the third way category. (Senators cause they’re better known and easier to remember)
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: I just thought of something wrt Third Way Dems. A good number of commenters here are people like Cole and Warren who were once Republicans and switched allegiances as the GOP went ever more bugfuck nuts. They very well may not have experienced that era the way some of us did. Clinton more or less lived up to his promise; Blair started well and then went to shit.
Another Scott
@ant: Virginia AG files suit against Roanoke robocallers:
$293M. Not bad. Make it so, please.
Everyone should contact their state AG and ask them to follow Herring’s lead.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kathleen
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for providing history and context.
J R in WV
@Patricia Kayden:
Fixed that for ya!!
J R in WV
@eldorado:
This is so wrong, and shows that some people never leave an urban or otherwise flat environment. Many people who live in geographically challenged areas with major relief to the topography will never be able to depend upon a cell device — they are line of sight only, and not very long range. 5G will be even moreso.
We have smart phones, and the charge last for week and weeks because they’re turned off unless we intend to look something up online or place a call ourselves. At home we have copper land line connection, no one will ever make a cell phone call from our residential area, we’re in what is known as a cove in a hillside, surrounded by ridges and boulders.
We had a contractor once who climbed onto the chimney and held his phone up as high as he could reach — nope, not gonna happen… Neighbors up on the ridge don’t have cell connectivity, out of range from the nearest cell tower.
So get over that landlines are so 20th century — yes they are, but still essential for millions of people all over all the mountains and open plains.
cckids
@Aleta:
They are separating children who’ve arrived with an older (as in adult) sibling, an aunt/uncle, or grandparent. Then classifying those children as “unaccompanied”, or at risk of being trafficked. It is just obscenely, Orwellian evil.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: And I thought it went without saying that I don’t think you can both forgive student debt to the tune Warren is suggesting and also ensure free tuition at high quality universities with the faculty/student ratios and research facilities we’ve come to expect. The cost of both goals is high, so you have to set priorities. IMO it makes the most sense to maintain the strength of public institutions and to renegotiate loan repayments instead of canceling them. What generated America’s prosperity in the twentieth century was the extraordinary amount of research done at universities that resulted in new medications, technologies, practices, etc. It’s crazy to squander that tradition by promising the moon. YMMV.
Another Scott
@tobie: As with criticism of Beto, there are lots of details that don’t show up in soundbites.
InsideHigherEd from April:
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.